5' x 5' Chinese Traditional Rug | Round | Brown and Ivory

A round rug measuring 5' x 5', hand-knotted in China in a traditional drawing. At a glance it reads as a soft brown disc with a pale eight-pointed star at the centre and a wide ivory border ringed in rust, the whole circle finished with a deep cream fringe that lies flat all the way around the edge.

The design

The field carries an all-over herati lattice, the fish pattern, worked at small scale: a diamond grid of fine vines with a rosette at each crossing and paired lancet leaves turning around them. Set into it is a lobed ivory medallion with a scalloped outline, and inside that an eight-pointed star outlined in rose and filled with the same miniature floral grid. Four ivory pendants answer the medallion at the quarters, each one a cusped cartouche with its own small spray of flowers. Outside the field run several concentric bands: a narrow rust-red guard of repeating boteh-like leaves, then the main ivory border of palmettes, rosettes and star flowers linked by a thin vine, then a second rust band and a pair of fine blue-green stripes that close the circle.

The colour

The ground is a brown that sits near olive and khaki where the light crosses the pile, and it is broken everywhere by the pinpoint ivory and pale rose of the lattice flowers, which is what keeps it from reading as flat. Against that ground the medallion and the main border are plain ivory, warm rather than white. The rust-red guard bands are the strongest colour on the rug and hold the composition together at the rim, with sage green, soft rose and small points of slate blue and dark brown doing the detail work in the border flowers.

The making

Hand-knotted in China, and the back shown against the ruler gives the measure of the weave: the knotting is fine and even, so the lattice motifs stay legible at the size of a fingernail, and the pattern comes through clearly on the reverse. The fringe is a plied ivory warp, knotted in bundles around the full circumference rather than at two ends as it would be on a rectangle. Condition is given as excellent, with full pile across the field and clean, intact edges, which is what you would want of a hand-knotted rug this closely drawn.