Chinese sword: real or fake?

[Nick Wardigo]

Josh Stout wrote:

These latest pictures don't show the line I thought was evidence of piled construction of the type one sees with twist core. Now it is looking like what I think is called "pool and eye" pattern though I am not good at pattern weld names. The Chinese would call this "flowery steel" (hua gang?).

Josh--
It may be overthinking the pattern-welding process to assign definite terms to every variation in patterning. When you say "pool and eye", I believe you are referring to a patterning that shows up in Persian (and, I think, Indian) wootz which is sometimes called, "rose." And, indeed, those recurring patterns were intentionally created by the smith (much like the "ladder of the Prophet" pattern). In the case of this Chinese saber, while the "pools" do resemble the "rose" pattern, I think they're just incidental to the horse-tooth forging. That is to say, the horse-tooth patterning was intentional, and in the process of forcing the lower-carbon cheek into that shape, the layers of steel were compacted and stretched to make pool-like shapes, but the pool-like shapes weren't intentional themselves. They were by-products of the horse-tooth pattern.

I haven't done a lot of research into Chinese forging nomenclature, but I think "hua gang" is a rather ambiguous term applied to patterned steel in general. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I haven't seen it used to differentiate in same way as the word "sham" is used to refer to a very specific type of wootz.