6'2" x 9'10" Chinese Oriental Rug | Burgundy & Black Wool and Silk Medallion | Approx. 200 KPSI

This is a workshop piece in the best sense: a hand-knotted wool and silk rug on a cotton foundation, woven at roughly 200 knots per square inch, which is well above what most floral room-size rugs in this format carry. The silk sits in the flower heads, the vine tips and the small ivory reserves inside the medallion, so the pattern lifts and shifts as you walk past it, while the wool ground stays matte and deep. The pile is still full and squared, the selvages are tight and the hand-tied ivory fringe has never been walked on, because the rug is brand new and has never been used. Every piece we sell ships with a certificate of authenticity confirming it is 100% hand-knotted, and this one is one of the more finely drawn examples we carry in the 6 by 10 range.

Design and Motifs

The layout is the classic closed-field composition: a single central medallion, 4 matching corner spandrels, and a field between them filled edge to edge with scrolling vine work. The medallion itself is built in layers, a small rosette core surrounded by 4 ivory cartouches, then a taupe lobed ring, then a black outline that pushes the whole figure forward against the dark ground. Above and below it run tall palmette pendants with curling acanthus leaves, drawn with a genuinely curved line rather than the stepped approximation you see on coarser weaves. The field carries hundreds of separate blossoms, buds and serrated leaves on thin connecting vines, all of it mirrored top to bottom and left to right. The black main border repeats a turtle palmette and rosette rhythm, framed on both sides by narrow ivory guard bands of small flower heads and running scroll, and the corner detail resolves cleanly instead of being cut off, which is a reliable tell of a carefully mapped cartoon.

A Deep Burgundy Field With Black, Taupe and Rose

The field reads as a deep burgundy, closer to wine or oxblood than to a bright red, and it darkens or warms depending on the light and on which direction you view the pile from. The main border and the medallion outline are a true black, not a navy, which gives the rug a formal, framed look and makes it sit well against dark wood or a cool grey wall. Between those two dark tones the drawing is worked in a soft taupe and mushroom beige, seen best in the spandrels and the medallion ring, with clean ivory used sparingly for highlights and for the guard borders. The flowers are salmon and rose pink with the occasional deeper raspberry center, and there is a quiet teal green running through the leaves that keeps the palette from going entirely warm. Overall it is a rich, traditional colorway with enough neutral taupe and ivory in it to feel less heavy than an all red and navy rug of the same size.

Origin and Weaving Quality

This rug was hand-knotted in China, where the better workshops have spent decades weaving classical floral designs to a high knot count with wool and silk, and it is honest to call it an Oriental rug rather than anything else. Fineness is what makes this kind of curved, flowing drawing possible at all: at roughly 200 knots per square inch the weaver has enough resolution to turn a vine smoothly and to place a 3 color flower head the size of a fingernail, which a 100 knot weave simply cannot do. The back shows small, even knots and straight rows, the wool has been clipped low so the silk highlights sit slightly proud of the surface, and the cotton warps are tensioned evenly, so the rug lies flat without waves along the length. If you are comparing it against other hand-knotted Oriental rugs in this size, the two things to weigh are the knot density and the silk content, and this piece is strong on both.