9'2" x 11'5" Chinese Art Deco Rug | Beijing Vase Medallion on Navy | Circa 1930s

Almost a century old and still doing exactly what it was drawn to do, this hand-knotted Beijing Art Deco piece measures 9'2" x 11'5" and carries a single gold vase of flowering branches on a wide, quiet navy field. The wool is thick and lustrous, the shearing is high and even, and the drawing is restrained in a way that almost no other weaving tradition of the 1930s attempted: 4 corner sprays, 1 centered vase, and a great deal of deliberate empty space between them. The photographs show the piece honestly, including areas where the pile has worn low from decades of use. It ships with a certificate of authenticity confirming age, origin, materials and hand-knotted construction.

Design and Motifs

The whole composition rests on one image: a rounded ginger jar standing on a slender 4 leg stand, its body banded with a fret and scroll meander borrowed from ancient bronze vessels, with flowering branches and long curling stems rising out of the neck. Nothing else interrupts the field. Each of the 4 corners carries a climbing spray of open 5 petal blossoms and small pointed leaves that grows inward from the border and then stops, leaving the center of the field bare so the vase reads from across the room. The inner frame is a narrow flat band with a fine outline on each side, and the outer border repeats the blossom vine in a loose, unhurried rhythm rather than a strict repeat, with single flowers spaced apart and stems wandering between them. This asymmetry and open drawing is what separates the Deco period work from earlier, denser medallion designs.

A Study in Navy, Gold and Teal

The field is a deep indigo navy that shifts as you walk around it, reading almost black under low light and opening into a clear midnight blue where the pile catches the sun. Subtle horizontal banding runs through the field, the natural signature of dip dyed wool and part of the character of a piece this age. Against that darkness the vase glows in beige and tan with warmer apricot and peach lights through the flowers, and the same soft gold repeats in the corner sprays and border blossoms, some of them closer to cream and ivory. The leaves and the thin arcs framing the vase are a muted teal, a blue green that is the only cool accent in the design and the detail that keeps the gold from turning brassy. Separating field from border is a flat olive tan band that has mellowed toward sage, a quiet third color that stops the navy and the gold from meeting too abruptly.

Woven in Beijing in the 1930s

Peking, now Beijing, was the center of the great Chinese export weaving boom of the 1920s and 1930s, when workshops there produced room size floor pieces aimed squarely at American and European apartments of the Art Deco era. The construction is distinctive: a heavy cotton foundation, a relatively open knot count by design, and long, thick, high sheared wool from northern Chinese flocks that gives the surface its velvet nap and lets a single motif float on an empty ground without looking thin. That plush handle, together with the fret banded vessel and the sparse blossom drawing, is how you identify a genuine Peking Oriental rug of this period rather than a later reproduction. Collectors of early 20th century Chinese Oriental rugs look for exactly this combination of dark indigo ground, gold vessel motif and honest surface wear.