10'2" x 20' Chinese Needlepoint Rug | Beige All-Over Floral Scroll | Palace Size Oversize

At 10'2" x 20' this is a genuine palace piece, long enough to run the full length of a formal dining room, a library or a hotel lounge without a seam or a join. It is hand-knotted in wool on a cotton foundation, and the drawing is pure needlepoint: a continuous scroll of leaves and flowers laid edge to edge across a beige ground, with no medallion and no open field to interrupt it. The scale of the piece is the point. Very few workshops set a loom this wide, and pieces in this format rarely come to market in this kind of unworn condition. It ships with a certificate of authenticity, and like every one of our oversize rugs, it ships free to all 50 states with no freight surcharge.

Design and Motifs

The field is an all-over floral design, built from broad curling acanthus leaves that turn back on themselves and hook into one another the whole way down the 20' length. Each unit mirrors left to right along the center axis, so the repeat reads as a series of open medallion-like frames rather than a mechanical grid. Inside those frames sit ragged gold blossoms outlined in navy, small 8 petal rosettes, half-open buds and clusters of 3 navy leaflets that punctuate the lighter ground. Fine ivory tendrils thread between the heavy leaves and keep the drawing from turning solid. A single wide lavender border carries the same vine in reduced scale, with gold flowerheads and navy sprigs spaced evenly along it, contained by narrow ivory guard stripes and a saw-tooth edge. The rug finishes in flat ivory fringe at both ends.

A Beige Ground Worked in Sage, Gold and Navy

The ground is a warm beige that leans toward cream in strong light and toward oatmeal in shade. Against it the leafwork is drawn in 2 greens, a dusty sage for the body of each leaf and a brighter apple green for the veins and outer edges, which is what gives the scroll its sense of depth. The flowers are a soft buttery gold rather than a hard yellow, some of them shaded into pale lemon at the petal tips. Navy blue does the accent work: outlines around the larger blossoms, small solid leaflets, and the dark sprigs that break up the border. Lavender is the surprise, used for the full width of the main border and picked up again in the smaller curling leaves inside the field, where it sits somewhere between grey and lilac. The overall effect is quiet and pale, a neutral rug at 10 feet away and a colorful one at arm's length.

Made in China: Needlepoint Drawing, Hand-Knotted Construction

Needlepoint drawing came out of European embroidery and tapestry work, and Chinese export workshops adopted it for the Western market, weaving the same stepped, stitch-like flowers by hand on the loom instead of on canvas. That is what you are looking at here: a European pattern language executed as a hand-knotted Oriental rug. The back photograph tells the story of the construction: a clean cotton warp and weft, an even knot line with no pulling or waviness across a 10'2" width, and a low, tightly clipped wool pile that holds the crisp stepped outlines the design depends on. Wide looms like this need 2 or 3 weavers working side by side for a long stretch, and keeping the field color consistent over 20 feet takes disciplined yarn batching. The wool is dense and springy underfoot, the selvages are tight, and the piece lies flat with no curl at the corners.