is this a pontil scar？

[sandchip]

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."

Jack, I wasn't trying to rile you or anyone else with my comments but only trying to help. No, I wasn't there but I believe by simple reasoning that not only is there no such thing as twisted off pontil scars, but refired pontils are yet another myth. To twist off a pontil rod from a bottle, the glass would have to be of the consistency of caramel, and that hot bottle has to somehow be held while the rod is twisted off. What was used to hold it that wouldn't deform or otherwise damage or deface the bottle? What, a snap case, maybe? That would be going around the world to visit our next door neighbor! And keep in mind, these guys were production-minded to turn out as many bottles as possible. Also, they didn't have torches to apply heat to an isolated area of a bottle so that they could twist off a pontil rod so that wishful future collectors could say that they found a pontilled bottle that in fact was only smooth-based. (I've only found 7 pontils in my 42 years of looking, and nobody wishes more than I do!) The same logic would apply to so-called refired pontils. To apply enough heat to cause the pontil scar to melt back into the surface of the bottle base would destroy the entire bottle, but also taking time that these workers didn't have to waste. Once again, how were these guys holding that bottle while they tried to stick the base into the furnace? Snap case? Blowpipe? Bare hands? Come on, y'all! Grinding and polishing was the method used to eliminate unsightly scars from more expensive wares, done after the bottle or decanter had cooled and could be handled by hand.

I'm probably ticking off a lot of folks here, and that's my last wish, but it is what it is. Just like the crescent-shaped "mold repairs" that caused such a hot debate a couple of years ago. Mr. Red Matthews, who worked in the glass industry, argued a couple of years defending that theory before finally accepting that those marks were indeed only the case of the gather being pinched between the mold halves, which were reopened, the gather rotated a little, mold closed and bottle blown. Remember once again, these workers were hauling butt, not only to knock out as many bottles as possible, but also because the hot glass has a very tight window of workability before stiffening up. It's a wonder that there aren't more of those marks. Those workers were amazing. Hell, that brings up another thing, the crude "drippy" tops that we love so. "...caused by the hot glass running down the neck..." It's only where the string of hot glass was applied inaccurately (because they had to work so fast) to the whetted off (sheared) bottle neck, before using the lipping tool. The bottle was being held horizontally during this process, so the glass couldn't be running down the neck. The hot glass was pretty soft, enough so that they had to keep the bottle rotating to prevent slumping, but it wasn't runny like syrup.

I'm done now. Y'all can unload on me all you want.

Love y'all. Mean it.

 

[haide]

Oh，I confused two dollars as one...
I tried to find some informations of Chinese bottles，and some books came out，not of the later functional bottles，but all of those ancient colourful glasses(coloured glaze).As far as I can see,the manufacturing of glass bottles here in the past 200 years is quite underdeveloped，lacking of scale，could be an
explanation of that，you can hardly find too many bottles in a very same style in the market. There're plenty of different styles of which each one just shows up on a very single bottle.
My pleasure to translate the characters on your Chinese bottles，but I'm not sure if I can do that well,since the antic Chinese is a bit hard to read even for Chinese，and communicating with you fellows here is actually my first time using English after school，I'm typing while dictionarying all the time.

 

[haide]

This is a big meal for me to digest.
You are all so kind here，thank you.

Jack, I wasn't trying to rile you or anyone else with my comments but only trying to help. No, I wasn't there but I believe by simple reasoning that not only is there no such thing as twisted off pontil scars, but refired pontils are yet another myth. To twist off a pontil rod from a bottle, the glass would have to be of the consistency of caramel, and that hot bottle has to somehow be held while the rod is twisted off. What was used to hold it that wouldn't deform or otherwise damage or deface the bottle? What, a snap case, maybe? That would be going around the world to visit our next door neighbor! And keep in mind, these guys were production-minded to turn out as many bottles as possible. Also, they didn't have torches to apply heat to an isolated area of a bottle so that they could twist off a pontil rod so that wishful future collectors could say that they found a pontilled bottle that in fact was only smooth-based. (I've only found 7 pontils in my 42 years of looking, and nobody wishes more than I do!) The same logic would apply to so-called refired pontils. To apply enough heat to cause the pontil scar to melt back into the surface of the bottle base would destroy the entire bottle, but also taking time that these workers didn't have to waste. Once again, how were these guys holding that bottle while they tried to stick the base into the furnace? Snap case? Blowpipe? Bare hands? Come on, y'all! Grinding and polishing was the method used to eliminate unsightly scars from more expensive wares, done after the bottle or decanter had cooled and could be handled by hand.

I'm probably ticking off a lot of folks here, and that's my last wish, but it is what it is. Just like the crescent-shaped "mold repairs" that caused such a hot debate a couple of years ago. Mr. Red Matthews, who worked in the glass industry, argued a couple of years defending that theory before finally accepting that those marks were indeed only the case of the gather being pinched between the mold halves, which were reopened, the gather rotated a little, mold closed and bottle blown. Remember once again, these workers were hauling butt, not only to knock out as many bottles as possible, but also because the hot glass has a very tight window of workability before stiffening up. It's a wonder that there aren't more of those marks. Those workers were amazing. Hell, that brings up another thing, the crude "drippy" tops that we love so. "...caused by the hot glass running down the neck..." It's only where the string of hot glass was applied inaccurately (because they had to work so fast) to the whetted off (sheared) bottle neck, before using the lipping tool. The bottle was being held horizontally during this process, so the glass couldn't be running down the neck. The hot glass was pretty soft, enough so that they had to keep the bottle rotating to prevent slumping, but it wasn't runny like syrup.

I'm done now. Y'all can unload on me all you want.

Love y'all. Mean it.

 

[sandchip]

This is a big meal for me to digest.
You are all so kind here，thank you.

Thanks, haide. I hope that I've been of some help, because that's what it's all about. I appreciate the reply because at times, I've thought about changing my name to "threadkiller"!

 

[haide]

Thanks, haide. I hope that I've been of some help, because that's what it's all about. I appreciate the reply because at times, I've thought about changing my name to "threadkiller"!

Sincerely,it's more than help. I believe different voices rub to the truth.So may I say:enjoy yourselfs “fighting” and “killing”.

 

[CanadianBottles]

Oh，I confused two dollars as one...
I tried to find some informations of Chinese bottles，and some books came out，not of the later functional bottles，but all of those ancient colourful glasses(coloured glaze).As far as I can see,the manufacturing of glass bottles here in the past 200 years is quite underdeveloped，lacking of scale，could be an
explanation of that，you can hardly find too many bottles in a very same style in the market. There're plenty of different styles of which each one just shows up on a very single bottle.
My pleasure to translate the characters on your Chinese bottles，but I'm not sure if I can do that well,since the antic Chinese is a bit hard to read even for Chinese，and communicating with you fellows here is actually my first time using English after school，I'm typing while dictionarying all the time.

Thanks Haide, I really appreciate that! I tried taking pictures of them and it didn't work out too well (lousy phone camera) so instead I wrote out the characters to the best of my ability and will try to post them here. Some of them had very small, difficult to read characters and since I didn't know what I was writing they may be completely indecipherable, but I think at least some of them should be legible. I'll try to post them tomorrow, I'm having difficulties posting photos from my phone and it's too late tonight.

By the way, your English is quite good for someone who hasn't used it since school. I can almost always understand exactly what you're saying and half of the time you get the grammar right, which is quite impressive since the grammar is completely different than Chinese grammar (at least I assume it is).

I'm surprised to hear that you don't find many bottles of the same kind for sale, since in British Columbia there were several kinds of Chinese bottles that consistently showed up. I guess it's because only certain products were shipped to Canada. In Canada the most common designs were:
Small square medicine bottles, usually unembossed but occasionally would have one or two characters on the bottom

Ring-neck beer or other alcoholic beverage bottles, usually, if not always, from the Wing Lee Wai company

Tiger whiskeys, though always in stoneware and never glass (you know what those look like).
Stoneware bottles with spouts commonly called soy sauce bottles. I don't know if this is what they actually contained:

None of those pictures are mine, but I have an example of all of them. Do you ever see bottles like those in China? They shipped thousands upon thousands of them to Canada and the Northwestern U.S. There are other sorts of Chinese bottles in Canada, lots of regular beer bottles and various shapes of medicine bottles, but those four are the most commonly found.
There were also a couple types of bottles which I previously believed to be Chinese, but after seeing pictures of the same bottles found at WWII sites on Guam I'm quite sure that they're Japanese. When I figure out how to post pictures of the writing on the bottles I have I bet that some of them will turn out to be Japanese rather than Chinese.

 

[andy volkerts]

And let us not forget that the San Francisco glassworks made several types of bottles with Japanese and Chinese writing on them for their customers of Asian descent over the years..........

 

[haide]

Thanks Haide, I really appreciate that! I tried taking pictures of them and it didn't work out too well (lousy phone camera) so instead I wrote out the characters to the best of my ability and will try to post them here. Some of them had very small, difficult to read characters and since I didn't know what I was writing they may be completely indecipherable, but I think at least some of them should be legible. I'll try to post them tomorrow, I'm having difficulties posting photos from my phone and it's too late tonight.

By the way, your English is quite good for someone who hasn't used it since school. I can almost always understand exactly what you're saying and half of the time you get the grammar right, which is quite impressive since the grammar is completely different than Chinese grammar (at least I assume it is).

I'm surprised to hear that you don't find many bottles of the same kind for sale, since in British Columbia there were several kinds of Chinese bottles that consistently showed up. I guess it's because only certain products were shipped to Canada. In Canada the most common designs were:
Small square medicine bottles, usually unembossed but occasionally would have one or two characters on the bottom
View attachment 171025
Ring-neck beer or other alcoholic beverage bottles, usually, if not always, from the Wing Lee Wai company
View attachment 171026
Tiger whiskeys, though always in stoneware and never glass (you know what those look like).
Stoneware bottles with spouts commonly called soy sauce bottles. I don't know if this is what they actually contained:
View attachment 171027
None of those pictures are mine, but I have an example of all of them. Do you ever see bottles like those in China? They shipped thousands upon thousands of them to Canada and the Northwestern U.S. There are other sorts of Chinese bottles in Canada, lots of regular beer bottles and various shapes of medicine bottles, but those four are the most commonly found.
There were also a couple types of bottles which I previously believed to be Chinese, but after seeing pictures of the same bottles found at WWII sites on Guam I'm quite sure that they're Japanese. When I figure out how to post pictures of the writing on the bottles I have I bet that some of them will turn out to be Japanese rather than Chinese.

I don't have a phone problem because I only use PC browsing web,however,you may not believe that，Chinese government blocked so many foreign websites，and I can’t find a reason to explain that this site is included.So my problem is I can only be here by using VPN，and sometimes it doesn't work well.

Thank you for the encouraging of my English,I think I should use it more frequently，and do not be shy of the mistakes.What surprised me is you can read some characters，as far as I know，Chinese is not clearer than Martain language for you Indo European，and if you knew nothing about Chinese，I don't think a dictionary would help，because you can't even get the location of the character you want to find.

When I said it's easy to find unique bottles here，I included the embossing.Compared with your rich and colourful bottles，as you know，Chinese bottles are more monotonous in colour and shape.The embossed medicine bottles are welcome here,any piece could be asked for more than 100 yuan.I belive ring-neck beer you posted is for export when I googled "Wing Lee Wai",which is a Hong Kong wine company founded in 1905.Almost all I found are stoneware,asked for 100-300 yuan,I’ll post some pictures.


What's the size of the soy sauce bottle?I'm not very familiar with these，but I know there is a similar type called “shui-zhu”（water filler），which is used for adding water while writing calligraphy,though,I prefer the kitchen things, according to the bodily proportion and the rough quality.

Very happy to introduce the Chinese bottles ，expect your photos.

 

[haide]

And let us not forget that the San Francisco glassworks made several types of bottles with Japanese and Chinese writing on them for their customers of Asian descent over the years..........

Thanks for the information,I did not know that.I did found some bottles embossed both in Chinese and English,seems like imports,but I don't know whether the bottles were made in China.

 

[CanadianBottles]

I was wondering whether or not this site would be blocked in China. Does the government block all discussion-based sites from the rest of the world? Or all vBulletin forums? I'm not sure why else this specific site would be targeted, unless they found enough of some certain keywords in the post history.

Ha ha no I couldn't read the writing, I just copied it like I would anything else. I still don't even quite understand how written Chinese works. So my attempts at writing out what was written on the bottles may be comically bad, I can't tell.

I'm surprised that you say Chinese bottles are more monotonous than Western bottles, since I remember seeing Chinese bottles in all sorts of fantastic colours that you rarely see in Western bottles when I lived on the West Coast. It's strange to see how expensive and hard it is to find bottles in China compared with how easy it is to find Chinese bottles in Canada. Canada didn't even have that many Chinese people at the time these bottles were used, I think there were around 10,000 Chinese people in the whole province at the turn of the century. I guess the problem is that no one is digging for bottles in China, whereas in Canada people have been digging up bottles for years, especially in the 1970's when the hobby was really popular. It's a shame you don't have access to anywhere to go digging, because I'm sure there are millions upon millions of fantastic bottles buried all over the place in China.

I've heard of those stoneware Wing Lee Wai bottles, though I don't remember ever seeing one. A few turn up here and there but very rarely. I'm guessing the glass bottles were intended for export while the stoneware ones were for use in China.

The soy sauce bottles are about the size of a tiger whiskey. I doubt they have anything to do with calligraphy, they're way too large and unweildy for any use that I can imagine.

Okay I'll try to post the pictures in a sec. These are just pictures of post-it notes with the characters written on them, since the bottles were too difficult to photograph.