Chinese sword: Real or Fake?

[fearn]

Hi Tim,

I've got a knife like that too. It was made in Pakistan. Recently....

There are a couple of important points here (at least to me). One is that fakery is about making money. If there's a good profit margin in people making fakes that are so good that we couldn't tell without sophisticated scientific tests, then they're going to do it.

This is what I call the "profit margin" test. As others have pointed out, this makes sense in cases where the market has gone in for irrational exuberance. With a Tibetan sword, possibly one-of-a-kind?.....

The other, bigger, problem is that we're trying to tell fake from real using a couple of poor-quality digital images. Even if the images are real, they may not show the details we need, and it is certainly easier to manipulate an image than to fake a sword.

The amazing thing is how often we can spot the fakes. Given the quality of the evidence, we're going to miss things occasionally and argue perhaps more often. What's wrong with that?

F