9'1" x 11'6" Antique Chinese Peking Rug | Art Deco Scattered Floral Field | 1910s

Antiques from the 1910s in this size rarely survive with their drawing this legible, and this 9'1" x 11'6" Chinese Peking rug has. It is hand-knotted in natural wool on a cotton foundation, with a wide open camel beige field carrying nothing but small blue and brown flowering sprigs, roughly a hand's width apart, drifting toward the border like blossoms on still water. The restraint is what dates it: by the 1910s the Peking workshops were already drawing for Western rooms, and this is the quiet end of that taste rather than the dragon-and-medallion end. The proportions land squarely in the 9x12 room size, so it sits under a full seating group or a 10 seat table without crowding the walls. Every rug we ship carries a certificate of authenticity recording the origin, age, materials and exact measurements.

Design and Motifs

The field is left almost entirely open, scattered with small detached sprays: a 5 petal blossom in brown wool with a pale blue center, a serrated leaf pair in two tones of blue, a single curling tendril no larger than a thumb. No two repeat in quite the same orientation, which is the tell of a drawn cartoon rather than a stamped one. A thin teal line encloses the field, then the main border runs a continuous leafy vine punctuated by large cloud-shaped blossoms in deep indigo haloed with lighter blue, with 4 corners resolved by turning the vine cleanly rather than forcing a mirrored motif. Small brown star flowers and pale coral buds break up the border rhythm at regular intervals. The whole composition is Art Deco in temperament, more negative space than pattern, and it is why a rug woven over 100 years ago still reads as calm in a contemporary room.

Camel Beige, Indigo and Walnut Brown

The ground is a warm camel beige that shifts between sand and light honey depending on the light, and because so little of the field is patterned, that wool tone effectively is the color scheme. Against it the weavers used a narrow but confident palette: a deep indigo that reads almost black in the leaf outlines, a mid teal blue for the leaf bodies, and a chalky pale blue used sparingly as an outline halo around the border blossoms. Warmth comes from walnut brown flower heads and small touches of faded coral and soft rose in the border. The near total absence of red is unusual and is exactly why this piece works with grey stone, oak floors, linen and brass. Fine horizontal striation runs through the field, the natural abrash of hand-spun wool taking dye unevenly, giving the plain ground movement rather than flatness.

Peking Weaving and the 1910s Export Workshops

Peking, now Beijing, was the center of Chinese workshop weaving from the late 19th century through the 1930s, producing pieces for the export trade in a heavier, looser knot than the fine city weaves of western Asia, but with thick lustrous northern Chinese wool and a clipped, sculpted finish along the motif edges that no other tradition uses in quite the same way. That carved outline is visible in the close-up photographs, where the pile is trimmed slightly lower around each leaf so the drawing stands proud of the ground. The cotton warp and weft are firm and the back is even, a workshop product rather than village work. If you want to understand how weave structure, wool handle and palette are read together, our guide to how to date an Oriental rug covers the same evidence we used to place this piece in the 1910s, and our article on what separates one Oriental rug tradition from another is worth reading before you buy an antique of this age.