5'9" x 8'9" Chinese Oriental Rug | Black All-Over Floral Wool & Silk | Brand New

Flat on the showroom floor, this 5'9" x 8'9" hand-knotted Chinese rug reads almost like lacquer work: a deep black ground carried edge to edge with ivory, blush and burgundy blossoms, framed by a wide camel border. The pile is wool with silk worked into the flower heads and leaf tips, which is why the blossoms lift off the dark field and change tone as you walk around the rug. It sits on a cotton foundation, has never been used, and ships with our certificate of authenticity. The footprint lands squarely in the most useful format we sell, so if you have been working through 6x9 Oriental rugs and want a dark field rather than the usual red, this is the piece to compare against.

Design and Motifs

There is no medallion here. The drawing is a classical all-over floral design, built from thin serpentine vines that split, curve back on themselves and carry a dense population of blossoms: lacy open rosettes set on the center axis, cupped garden roses, 5 petal flower sprays, small buds and narrow sickle leaves. The composition mirrors cleanly from side to side, which gives the field a formal rhythm even though the vines never repeat in exactly the same way. The main border is a camel ground carrying alternating leafy palmettes and rose sprays on a meandering vine, and it is held in place by narrow burgundy and ivory guard stripes on both edges, with a fine reciprocal flower chain on the outermost stripe. Flat-woven ends finish into ivory cotton fringe.

A Black Field Built on Ivory, Blush and Burgundy

The ground is a genuine black, not a very dark navy or charcoal, and it does the heavy lifting: every flower head sitting on it gains contrast it would never have on a cream field. Inside that field the palette is deliberately soft, running through cream, chalky ivory, pale blush pink, dusty rose, a muted sage and olive in the leaves, light coffee brown in the vines and sharp accents of brick red and burgundy in the smaller buds. The silk highlights sit mostly in the rosettes and the leaf edges, so the lighter tones read as almost pearl in raking light and settle back to matte cream from directly above. The border reverses the scheme into camel and tan with the same blush and burgundy flowers, which keeps the transition from field to edge warm rather than abrupt. Buyers shopping black and ivory rugs should know this one leans warm, not cold.

Chinese Workshop Weaving and Quality

This is an honest Made in China workshop piece, hand-knotted one knot at a time in the classical floral idiom that Chinese ateliers adopted and refined for the export market. If you are weighing it against other traditional pieces, our guide to what separates a Persian rug from a wider Oriental rug is worth 5 minutes before you buy. The weave itself is what makes the drawing possible: the vines are a single knot wide in places and the small buds hold their shape, which only happens when the knot count is high enough and the wool is spun fine. The pile is clipped low and even, the silk is used as accent rather than filler, and the selvedges are tightly overcast. The close detail photograph with the ruler shows the density of the knotting and the thin, well-plied cotton warps running out into the fringe. For a dark, formal rug of this size, it is a lot of hand work for the money.