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One flask of this pair has stencil-like paintings of three turtles—a young one with its parents—while the other has a crane with a leg raised. Cranes and turtles are well-recognized symbols of longevity in East Asia, with the turtle said to live for ten thousand years and the crane for one thousand. <br><br>Each flask also has a poem on the back, one in Chinese and the other in Japanese. The latter, which appears on the turtle flask, reads <em>kame iwaku kamiyo wa, ore no wakaki toki</em>. The seventeen-syllable poem begins with “turtle” and ends with “when I was young.” It can be translated as, “the turtle said the world of the gods began when I was young.” <br><br>The poem on the crane flask is two nonconsecutive five-character lines from a poem called “Crane Feelings” by the famous Tang dynasty poet Bai Juyi (772–846). One character in one of the lines has been altered. This creative poetic sampling results in a verse reading <em>zheng shi qun ji qian, tong you zhe tong zhi </em>爭食羣雞前，同遊者同志. It could perhaps be translated, “before the flock of chickens competing for food, those traveling together have the same ambitions.”