Oriental vase (continued)

by Carol
(Maryland, USA)

Peter,
I am sorry that my first stab at photographing the calligraphy was too blurry. Here is a clearer photo. Hope you can read it!

Hi Carol,
Sorry for not being clear.
It is not a problem of your photographing. Your last picture of the last line was clear enough. The first character is smeared so that we cannot read it at all. (It was smeared before firing in the kiln.) The second we cannot read because of the handwriting.
With Chinese it is often the same as with western writing, when a letter is not clear we guess what it could be from the context, e.g., the previous and following letters. Here we have just no way to read the second character because of the handwriting. It either uses abbreviated strokes or it is a rare character/name we do not know.

This is quite normal and sometimes the writing is simply undecipherable, although it is possibly that a contemporary reader might have been able to know what it says.
We often have to leave it at that because characters are impossible to read.

I don't think this affects the collecting value of your item. This would only be the case if it was from some famous artisan, but in that case it should be possible to find the name using the remaining characters.

Oriental vase -- trying to post clear calligraphy

by Carol
(Maryland, USA)

Here is take 2 on the left-most 4 characters on the back of my vase.

Can you tell what it says?


Thanks,
Carol