12' x 15'5" Chinese Art Deco Rug | Salmon Field, Navy Blue Border | 1930s Peking Antique

This 12' x 15'5" Chinese Art Deco rug was hand-knotted in the 1930s, and it is the kind of piece that decided a whole room when it was new. The field is a warm salmon, almost empty, carrying a single round floral medallion and a scatter of flowering sprays, butterflies and birds, with a deep navy blue border wrapping the whole thing. The wool is glossy and heavy, the pile still full across all 185 inches of length, and the ends and edges are original. At 12 feet wide it sits squarely in the oversize antique rugs group, large enough to float a full seating arrangement or a 12 seat dining table with the chairs pulled back. Every rug we sell ships with a certificate of authenticity recording the origin, age, materials and exact measurements of this specific piece.

Design and Motifs

The drawing is classic Art Deco restraint. A single round medallion sits dead center, packed with curling vine, small 5 petal blossoms and broad navy leaf forms, and everything else in the field is left to breathe. Flowering branches, peony and lotus sprays, butterflies and small long-tailed birds are placed at intervals across the salmon ground, each one drawn as an isolated vignette rather than tied into a repeating lattice. Look closely and a faint carved ribbon pattern runs through the open ground, a raised outline effect worked into the pile itself, which is one of the hallmarks of good Deco era Chinese weaving. The 4 corners carry cloud scroll spandrels studded with blossoms. The border stack is disciplined: a pearl dot band, then a salmon and navy Greek key fret, then a wide navy blue outer band filled with gold arabesque and blue palmettes, finished with a plain navy guard that reads almost like a picture frame.

The Salmon and Indigo Palette

Color is the whole argument for this rug. The field is a soft salmon that leans coral in daylight and rose under lamplight, with gentle abrash moving through the ground the way only naturally dyed wool does. Against it, the border is a saturated indigo navy, dark and even, with no purple cast. Between those two poles the weaver used a small, very deliberate accent palette: antique gold and ochre through the border arabesques, sage and olive green on the vines and leaf tips, two blues in the flowers, a bright sky blue and a near black navy, plus ivory blossoms and a rose pink outline in the fret band. The green and gold keep the salmon from reading sweet, and the ivory dots give the eye something to travel along. It is a warm, high-contrast scheme that works over dark hardwood, pale oak and stone alike.

Woven in China: Peking Art Deco, 1930s

Rugs of this type came out of the Peking and Tientsin workshops in the decades between the wars, when Chinese weavers were producing large floor pieces for American and European interiors and adapting old imperial motifs to the spare, open layouts the Deco period wanted. The construction here is honest workshop work: a cotton foundation, a thick wool pile clipped and then carved around the motifs, and a moderate knot count that suits the bold scale of the drawing rather than chasing fineness. That heavy pile is also why the rug has survived 90 years with its full depth intact. As an Oriental rug of the 1930s, the tells are all consistent, from the wool quality and dye behavior to the border structure, and the same features are the ones used to date an antique rug in the hand.