"Spirit bottles" were once popular funerary objects and placed beside the feet of the corpse, in which to "keep" the spirit of the dead person in southern China during the Southern and Northern Dynasties, the Song Dynasty and well into the Yuan Dynasty. The bottles could be decorated and topped with a pagoda-shaped lid. The decoration can consist of lines of lotus leaf patterns, the long neck can be painted with portraits of people, flowers, grasses, frogs, butterflies, sea birds, fish and lotus flowers or relief sculptures of flying dragons and figures of Buddha as well as various patterns covering the whole bottle.
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