is this a pontil scar？

[CanadianBottles]

Neither looks like any sort of base marking I've ever seen, but since they come from China I'm not surprised. I'd imagine that they were probably using some fairly different techniques for glassmaking over there than they were here. Mind you I've seen a fair amount of Chinese bottles on the west coast and none of them looked even remotely like that as well, but these are probably earlier than the ones I was seeing.

 

[haide]

Thank you for the further analysis.

I still have 2 questions：Is the scar a bit too small to the body size?
What happened to the invisible seems on the blue piece,have been polished?

By the way，I missed the clear one but the cobalt is still there，I'd like to take it if it's probably a pontiled one.

 

[haide]

The clear one is in a common style of Chinese medicine bottles before 1950s，the blue one is not that conmmon to me too.I found a picture shows a similar fuzzy hazy ponti scar，are they comparable？

 

[CanadianBottles]

If it was a Western bottle, the scar would absolutely be too small for the bottle, but it also looks like a pontil of some sort, so it very well could be a pontil in some sense of the word.

One thing to take into consideration, though, is that the fact that it may have a pontil doesn't necessarily mean that much since it's an Asian bottle. Bottles made in North America with a pontil are valued at a premium because it means that they probably date to around the American Civil War or earlier. I really doubt that one is anywhere near that old. Glassmaking techniques varied wildly between different countries, so for example the bottles being made in 1920 in England looked like the bottles being made in 1870 in the U.S. Some bottles currently being made in Eastern Europe look like the bottles that were being made in 1920 in the U.S. Since I don't have any knowledge of Chinese glassblowing techniques, and probably neither does anyone else here, evaluating a bottle based on how it was made is very difficult. I personally wouldn't spend very much on this bottle, especially considering the chip/crack in the lip. If it had embossing or a label it would be a different matter, but I wouldn't spend more than five dollars (that's 25 yuan according to Google) on it even if it was undamaged.

 

[CanadianBottles]

No that pontil you posted (which is a really weird one, I've never seen one like that) isn't really comparable to the blue bottle. If the blue bottle does have a pontil, which I'm not sure if it does, it's that little dot in the centre of the base.

 

[sandchip]

I don't see a pontil mark on either. And there is no "twisted off" pontil scar. What you are seeing is where the gaffer rotated the blowpipe to gather glass which is then clipped off by his apprentice, inserted into the mold and blown. If the gather is a little stiff, that swirl won't completely disappear as it is blown against the mold surface. What many folks call ground lines are also gather lines as well. Many times on good examples, you can follow them 'round and 'round from neck to base. Something happens to the temper of the glass as the gather is rolled on the marver that causes the glass to weather differently in the ground, causing those lines to become more noticeable, hence the misnomer "ground lines". I've seen many bottles that have never been in the ground that have those same lines. Also, the indentation on the rectangular example looks like a large bubble that burst sometime during blowing while the glass was still hot enough for the bubble edge to melt back in on itself.

 

[haide]

CanadianBottles：Your full introduction here confirms my guess，which is world's glass technologies are divied by time and space,it's really necessary to do some individual research national.Unfortunately I haven't found any detailed informations of technology of Chinese functional glass bottles yet，maybe I should dig deeper.I give up this piece for now,it's more than 10 times of your suggestion.(by the way,5 dollars equals 32 yuan here now~)

Sandchip:That's really a specific interpretion.There is one thing I still don't understand:since it is a "tail" of the glass gather,it should be a protrusion of the gather surface，means it would be pushed onto the mold base in the first time，even if it’s a little stiff to be flattened，it shouldn't be a depression at all in my mind，but we can find that it is a sag in the photo？

 

[cannibalfromhannibal]

I don't see a pontil mark on either. And there is no "twisted off" pontil scar. What you are seeing is where the gaffer rotated the blowpipe to gather glass which is then clipped off by his apprentice, inserted into the mold and blown. If the gather is a little stiff, that swirl won't completely disappear as it is blown against the mold surface. What many folks call ground lines are also gather lines as well. Many times on good examples, you can follow them 'round and 'round from neck to base. Something happens to the temper of the glass as the gather is rolled on the marver that causes the glass to weather differently in the ground, causing those lines to become more noticeable, hence the misnomer "ground lines". I've seen many bottles that have never been in the ground that have those same lines. Also, the indentation on the rectangular example looks like a large bubble that burst sometime during blowing while the glass was still hot enough for the bubble edge to melt back in on itself.

Well, I don't know about all that as I have had decanters with an apparently twisted pontil scar and refired on some and others not. I see no such evidence to the contrary and will leave it at that. I also realize we have come a long way from the earlier days of collecting on figuring out what went on in the early glassmaking, but to say with certainty that that is the case is a rather bold assumption considering the numerous variety of possibilities. That aside, I had no reason to figure this guy is from China which makes anything possible. Guess I'll go jump back into my hole and continue digging and just leave this page to you "experts."

 

[Bass Assassin]

Hey Jack, are you finding anything?

 

[CanadianBottles]

CanadianBottles：Your full introduction here confirms my guess，which is world's glass technologies are divied by time and space,it's really necessary to do some individual research national.Unfortunately I haven't found any detailed informations of technology of Chinese functional glass bottles yet，maybe I should dig deeper.I give up this piece for now,it's more than 10 times of your suggestion.(by the way,5 dollars equals 32 yuan here now~)

You're thinking of American dollars, Canadian dollars aren't worth as much. And yeah ten times that is WAY too much for that bottle. It's pretty rare for a bottle without any words on it to be worth that much. It would have to be very old. Since there probably aren't very many Chinese bottle collectors, and value is determined by demand, it won't be often that you'll come across any bottle actually worth that much. Where I'm from, on Vancouver Island, fifty dollars could buy several really nice Chinese bottles at a collectibles sale. They may have been somewhat undervalued there though, because no one could read what was written on them. I've got a couple Chinese medicine bottles, one of which I dug myself, but I have no idea what was in them or who made them because I can't read Chinese.
Unfortunately it will likely be very difficult to find information on the advancement of glassblowing techniques in China. What collectors know in North America comes from fifty years' worth of research, which included talking to the people who made the bottles back when they were still alive in the 60's and 70's. It's not something that was very well recorded because a hundred years ago they couldn't have imagined that people in the future would be interested in how they were making bottles. Another issue is that from the Chinese bottles I have in my collection, it seems that they were using very different techniques and levels of quality control at the same time in history. Most Chinese bottles dug in Canada were brought here around 1890-1920, and some of them are extremely crudely made while others were made using the most modern techniques of the era.