Message #49318

[forestman]

Hi George,

The text about a coral bottle in A Treasury of Chinese Snuff Bottles talks about the point you raised.

"The hollowing also proves the fallacy of the rule of thumb that is currently circulating that modern hardstone bottles can be differentiated from old ones by the profile of the neck drilling. It holds that old bottles have the mouth drilled down in a cylindrical shape for the entire depth of the neck, whereas modern ones go in at an angle, facilitating the hollowing process."

It seems just as possible for old or new bottles to have an opening up of the neck the deeper it goes as the illustration from Hugh Moss's book I posted shows. The drills used to open up the interior would need to be of a smaller diameter than the initial drill used to first form the neck opening in order to get an angle into the bottle. It could be that with modern tools that the reverse is true, that modern bottles have the neck opening drilled straight down and remaining parallel.

It goes on to mention Zhang Yishu's comment "When the vulgar with their little knowledge use it as the basis of argument, it always turns out to be the most superficial nonsense".

He was referring specifically to dating by width of mouth.

I must be vulgar and certainly accept to having little knowledge but I'm not specifically trying to see any correlation to width of mouth and dating although looking at what I've found it throws up some thoughts.

Regards, Adrian.