8' x 11'7" Chinese Oriental Rug | Formal Traditional All Over Floral | Black and Burgundy | Never Used

This is a formal, workshop-woven Oriental rug made in China, hand-knotted on a cotton foundation with a 3/8" wool pile that still has its full original height. Nothing about it has been walked on: the fringe is clean and even, the selvages are tight, and the pile stands up crisply when you run a hand across it. The scale suits a big seating group or a full dining set, which puts it squarely in the most useful range of 8x11 hand-knotted area rugs. Every rug we sell ships with a certificate of authenticity confirming that it is genuinely hand-knotted, along with its origin, materials and measurements.

Design and Motifs

The field carries a continuous all over floral, with no central medallion to break it up. Thin vine scrolls travel corner to corner and carry open lotus blossoms, layered palmettes, small 8 petal rosettes and slender serrated leaves, each flower drawn with enough shading in the outline to read as three dimensional rather than flat. The drawing is curvilinear throughout, which is the harder way to weave a field like this, and the repeat is set out so that the vines meet cleanly at all 4 corners instead of being cut off at the border. Framing it is a wide main border of alternating palmettes and rosettes, held between narrow ivory guard stripes of running vine on both sides and finished with a plain outer band. Close up, as in the border photograph, you can see the individual knot rows following the curve of each leaf.

Color Palette

The field is a deep, near jet black that photographs flat but in person shows the natural abrash and luster of good wool, shifting slightly toward charcoal where the light strikes the pile. Against it the floral work sits in ivory, cream and a warm buttery gold, with blush and dusty rose shading inside the larger blossoms and small touches of soft sage green in the leaves and calyxes. The main border is a rich burgundy, closer to wine than to fire red, and the ivory guard stripes give a bright edge that separates the border from the black field so the pattern stays legible from across a room. A few flower centers pick up a muted slate blue, which keeps the palette from reading as a straight black, red and cream scheme. The overall effect is formal and high contrast, and it works best over light floors such as the natural oak parquet shown in the photographs.

Origin and Weave

China has produced fine hand-knotted floral weaving for export for well over a century, and the better workshops built their reputation on exactly this kind of dense, evenly clipped wool pile with tightly controlled curvilinear drawing. This piece is a good example of that tradition: knot rows are consistent, the back is even with no waviness or buckling, the sides are hand-overcast, and the wool has been clipped low enough to hold the fine detail in the border while staying thick underfoot. The folded corner photograph shows the reverse, where the pattern comes through clearly, a reliable sign of a genuine hand-knotted weave rather than a machine-made copy. If you are comparing it against other hand-knotted Oriental rugs, look at how straight the borders run over nearly 12 feet of length, which is a fair measure of loom control.