Flat round bottles like this have been dubbed “turtle-shaped bottles,” for obvious reasons. They were probably used as portable bottles for water and liquor, since they could be easily attached to a belt or a bag with a piece of rope or cord. The body of this particular bottle was decorated with a sgraffito technique, wherein a relatively wide area of the surface layer of white slip is scraped away to reveal the darker base clay. Here, the background surrounding the white peonies was scraped away to highlight the design. In this case, the scraped area was then painted with iron-brown underglaze, which darkened during the firing process, further accentuating the visual contrast.