Metal Reviews

These inscriptions are on the blade of an antique bronze sword that I bought from China. The seller has failed to give me anything more useful than "Very real China sword very old bronze". Perhaps the inscriptions will give me some clues of its origins and age.

Above the divide says "Made in Taiwan" and "copyright 2004" underneath.

i dunno.. my guess is:

"...One Sword to rule them all, One Sword to find them
One Sword to bring them all, and in the darkness bind them..."


a typical inscription on all antique weapons and accessories.

Are you sure those are Chinese characters? They don't look like any I've ever seen before. I can try and ask a couple people I know who are passable with Chinese, though.

I only recognize a few of them. On the left, from top down it reads Large and the King. And on the right, the top one means ummm... Right Now. The second from the bottom on the right looks really funky but it kind of looks like either water or fire. Thats just from my japanese knowledge though and the characters they use are basically the same but sometimes have slightly different meanings or appearances.

Fire and Water def are not on there that I can see, at least not how I see them written. Big King (Da Wang) is right. The second one down on the right looks like the word for "store" Dien, like you see with hotels and resturaunts, etc.

So what do we have so far: Fire, King, Large...

I think it says " I want a large whopper and I rape dogs unintentionally".


That's all I've learned from Japanese porn.

Hmm, unless it's a blatant fake there might be a reference to which king (and thus Dynasty) on there somewhere. There are more letters on the other side. At least the way the the blade has been forge around two kinds of metal looks legit.

actually dude was right, the second one from the bottom right looks like water but after looking at it closer I think it is the character for "forever" whick looks just like water except has a line on the top. Fire is more like a running man with no line.

I just had a Chinese friend try to read it and he is convinced its a fake. If you payed $50 or less, even for a fake, you got your money's worth. A real sword of this nature costs, according to my friend, close to $300 000.

He says the characters on the left starts with 'the king of the sky' and then a family name character followed by a character meaning 'person or people'. The characters on the right starts with 'at the present it is in line with' and then a very strange character according to him. Of course the picture right at the bottom is that of the chinese phoenix.

Hope this helps a little.

Blade's friend was far more helpful than mine. All I got from her was that those look more like pictographs than actual characters, though she could probably at least identify a couple, or their modern spinoffs.

Shit.

Did you buy that at Wal Mart in Suzhou or something? I never buy shit in China except DVD's, food and beer.

Highly recommend Beijing as a cool place to check out though. Just don't buy any "antiques" there, especially if you don't have a Chinese friend/GF, etc with you.

Well I didn't expect it to be "ancient" but it is certainly an antique; being over 100 years old. I only paid $80 for it, and it will come in handy for my history classes when demonstrating Chinese bronze technology. Kids love a good prop, and how are they to know it's not the real deal.

And no, I bought it from an antique dealer. You order food from China? Man, and I get impatient waiting for a pizza delivery.

No, I go there often. lol 80 bucks is probably cool for a sword.