Message #48606

[Joey Silver / Si Zhouyi 義周司]

   The mark looks modern to me, because it is too well done. The genuine original marks are cruder (and I've had 9 of them in my possession), because they were done with a foot pedal powered grinder. This looks like it was done with a very fine diamond tipped power tool.

And the usual size for genuine Imperial Qianlong octagonal bottles is about 50-60 mm (5-6 cm).
This is more the size of a  bottle from the Yongzheng reign.

Clare Chu has a collection of 7 of these octagonal bottles, from 3.5 cm up to 7 cm in size, bought in the Shanghai Flea Market for US$30-50 each. There were two Hong Kong collectors who, in the 1990s, would not buy octagonal glass bottles without incised Imperial marks. And dozens of octagonal bottles all of a sudden came on the market WITH such marks.

   Most of my reign marked Imperial bottles (and I had only one in 1987, which I featured in my exhibition catalogue that year, #2, bought from YF Yang in 1981 during the ICSBS Honolulu convention), came from the Marian Mayer Collection, via Bob Hall in 1989 at the ICSBS Chicago convention (#53, 54, 59, 60, 61 & 62), and so had great provenance.  The last four bottles were quite crudely polished and carved overlays, but all had genuine Qianlong marks, authenticated by Bob Hall as well as YF Yang and Hugh Moss, who'd helped Bob with his 2nd catalogue, where these were illustrated.