I’m fairly confident now that the is Japanese made but I’d love to know for sure what it is? I’m assuming it’s a shaker or a sander of some sort but have no idea of its age/provenance?
Thanks in advance,
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The writing on it is in English “STERLING” and in Mandarin “Pure Silver” Which is slightly confusing as it clearly has to be one or the other. Or, I suppose, neither.
When the Japanese say “Pure Silver” they actually mean .950 or higher. So this bilingual mark by an anonymous Chinese company should raise some questions even on a day when the spot price of pure silver is heading for $95 US.
As to what it is; it is modern, probably about 1970’s and probably made for the Hong Kong export market. It’s half of a salt and pepper set, and presumably the top comes off to allow for the pepper in ground form to be inserted. This sort of item often originated from Guangdong, Fujian or other southern provinces in this period when a great deal of silver was sold to raise badly-needed liquidity. Unfortunately they were often melting down 19th century and earlier siver to make something the tourist or export market would move quickly.
The hand-planishing silver effect is machine-created rather than by hammer.
The shape is that of a small or even quite large earthenware storage jars from the Tang Dynasty or earlier, 628-907 AD. The shape was also adopted by the Japanese potters but later.
If you should feel tempted to test it for silver content it would be interesting if you were inclined to post the results.
CRWW
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我注意到你在Reddit上发帖，有人用AI搜索了一下，根据聊天GPT算法的搜索结果，断言这是日语。看到这个，我也做了同样的搜索，结果也得到了完全错误的信息。幸好我们公司有内部翻译团队！
Clearly you didn’t accept the AI data repeat and posted here. This demonstrates two points that apply to silver research and generally.
First AI’s various purveyors are all trying to produce answers to please their clients so we will go back and ask more questions which generates more revenue for them. This makes the data produced inherently unreliable which is why this sort of old fashioned person-to-person data scoop and transfer has a long and valuable future.
Secondly, we tend to believe stuff that is written authoritatively – which I suppose if why we elect the likes of Mssrs. Starmer in your country and Trump in our neighbour’s to the south—the nonsense gets repeated and becomes “gospel”. (The four gospels are actually rather a good early example of this effect so I use the hackneyed expression deliberately).
CRWW
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