Christmas in June!

Cathy,

Seeing the mark face on, Yes, it does look suitably crude (it still seems strange to me to write that - since we basically look for the 'best' quality! But in this case, cruder is better, to a point).

Re.size, it seems to me more suitable to a Yongzheng bottle than a Qianlong bottle; and the glass colour and the wide mouth, look 'right' for 18th C., so it might simply be from earlier in the Qianlong reign, say ca.1740-1760, or, as Adrian suggests from somewhere he read, that it was a gift bottle, and thus smaller. But by and large, the ones with incised marks were NOT meant as gifts, or at least not to go outside the Forbidden City, in my understanding.

Re.the marks on my bottles: Sadly, I've no photo of the mark on my purple glass flask (#2 in my 1987 catalogue), but if you have Robert Hall C.S.B. #2, from 1989, he had the bases photographed and they are with the bottles. In an earlier post, I listed the 6 marked glass bottles I bought then from the Marian Mayer Collection out of that sales catalogue.

I really went to town at that convention! I saw Bob & Lindsey Hall on the Sunday before the convention, and bought 10 bottles (I wanted 15, but 5 were on hold for another collector; I subsequently bought 2 of the 5. In fact, I bought one of them while on a flight from London to Toronto - it was Bob Hall's luck I was trying to 'save' money, flying Club instead of First, so he had a captive audience for 7 hours!

As well, I bought 12 top quality bottles from Clare Chu, then Clare Lawrence (then Clare Lawrence ltd, London; now, Asian Art Studio, LA).
I also bought a Qianlong period Palace Workshops Lapis Lazuli bottle with a Qianlong couplet incised on one side, complete with a Yuzhi ('By Imperial Command Made' mark) mark as part of the inscription, from Chris Randall (JWA Int.)