9'4" x 11'9" Khotan Design Oriental Rug | Chotan Roundel Medallions | Hand-Knotted in Pakistan

This 9'4" x 11'9" rug is a hand-knotted revival of the old Chotan, or Khotan, drawing from the caravan towns of East Turkestan, woven in Pakistan on a cotton foundation with a hand-spun wool pile. The field is a quiet ivory, and five large roundels float on it, each ringed by a barber-pole band of brown, blush and pale blue. It is a room-size piece for a 9x12 footprint, 9'4" x 11'9" as measured, in excellent condition with an even pile and straight selvedges. Every rug we sell ships with a certificate of authenticity confirming it is genuinely hand-knotted, along with the weave, material and origin details recorded on this page. If you want to understand where a piece like this sits against Persian city weaving, our guide on what separates a Persian rug from a broader Oriental rug covers it plainly.

Design and Motifs

The layout is the classic Chotan roundel scheme: 5 large circular medallions placed 2, 1, 2 across the ivory field, each one built from a stepped 8 point star core inside a paler blue disc, then wrapped in a striped ring that reads almost like a rope collar. Between and around them the weaver has scattered a tidy vocabulary of small motifs, stiff pomegranate trees on straight trunks, 8 armed snowflake rosettes, angular quatrefoils and squared cloud knots, plus a small stepped cross at the exact center of the field. The main border is the piece's signature: a bold interlocking fretwork band of hooked brackets in dark brown and pale blue, framed inside and out by a Greek key guard stripe and a fine diamond chain. At each corner the drawing resolves into a large key motif rather than being cut off, which is the mark of a cartoon followed properly. The whole composition is geometric and open, with plenty of bare ground left to breathe, so the rug carries pattern without crowding a room.

The Ivory, Gray and Blue Palette

Color here is deliberately restrained. The field is an ivory with a gray, almost oatmeal cast, and it shifts slightly across the width in the way hand-spun wool always does, which keeps a large expanse of light ground from looking flat or printed. Inside the roundels the discs are a soft powder blue, the sort of washed sky tone that looks silver from a standing height and clearly blue up close. Against that sit the darks: a deep brown that reads nearly black in the fretwork border and in the striped rings, doing all the structural work in the design. Between those poles runs a band of muted warm tones, a dusty blush and a light tan in the medallion cores, the little trees and the outer guard stripes, which is what keeps the rug from going cold. Gray appears both as an actual yarn in the guard stripes and as an optical effect where pale blue meets brown. The result is a genuinely neutral rug, easy alongside white plaster, oak flooring, linen upholstery or gray stone, and forgiving of whatever accent color a room already carries.

Origin and Weaving Quality

Made in Pakistan, where the Peshawar and Lahore workshops have spent the last few decades rebuilding the great antique Turkestan and Central Asian designs on hand-spun, naturally toned wool. The Khotan original came from the southern edge of the Taklamakan desert, a Silk Road town whose weavers borrowed Chinese fretwork and Persian rosettes and made something of their own from them, and that borrowing is exactly what you see in the border and the roundels of this piece. The back photograph, taken with a foot scale laid across the weave, shows a firm, regular knot count with clean rows and no pulling, and the pile has been clipped low so the outlines of the fretwork stay crisp. Handle it and the wool feels dry and springy rather than slick, which is what you want in a floor rug this size, and it is why good contemporary Pakistani weaving holds its own among hand-knotted Oriental rugs at any price. For a living room or dining room laid out for a 9x12 area rug, this one covers the floor without dominating it.