The Silk Roads Of The Sea: Dhows, Junks, and Caravels

LISBON, April 16, 2011 -- When one thinks of the ancient carpet trade, it is the Silk Roads and camels which first come to mind.

But the trade routes that connected East and West were not just overland. Many of the same goods that moved across Eurasia by caravans also moved along the coasts by ship. And these Silk Roads maritime routes have a fascinating history of their own.

Shown here is a "Portuguese" carpet woven in Persia or India at the end of the 16th century and most likely commissioned by European merchants.

Such carpets were woven at a time when Europeans had still only recently begun trading with the East by sea. The carpets are named after their Portuguese-looking ships and sailors which, some observers believe, illustrate the biblical story of Jonah cast overboard and swallowed by a whale.

Just how and when the vast chain of sea-trading links connecting the western and eastern worlds got started is impossible to known. But by the time of the Romans, it was already well established. The sea-trade ran across the Mediterranean to the Red Sea, across the Indian Ocean, and up the rim of the Pacific using a variety of boats suited to local conditions.

The Romans' galleys and bathtub-shaped sailing ships went only as far east as Alexandria, at the landlocked end of the calm sea they called Mare Nostrum. There, they picked up goods transported overland from the Red Sea, which had much rougher sailing conditions altogether.

The Red Sea, and beyond that the Indian Ocean, was the world of Arab dhows.

They were rigged to sail tightly against the wind as well as before it, so they could hug the ocean coastline and minimize the risk of going far out to sea. The dhows connected Arabia with Persia and India and went as far as the Malay Peninsula.

Beyond the Malay Peninsula, still another world began, that of ocean-going Chinese junks. They too, could run against the wind or before it, but they were much bigger than dhows and could stand very heavy seas without being swamped. They connected Southeast Asia with China's main ports of Canton and, farther north, Hangzhou.

What did this ancient trading network, which remained virtually unchanged until European ships moved east a thousand years later, carry?

The most important goods of all were spices, which were highly valued by people across Eurasia. The spices were prized as luxurious flavorings for food, as the most effective ingredients of contemporary medicines, and as perfumes for secular, medicinal and religious use.

The spices were cultivated in Arabia (cinnamon and frankincense), in India (pepper and sugar) and in the islands of Indonesia (nutmeg, mace, and cloves). The variety of spices traded was staggering, with just the four biggest being pepper, cinnamon, ginger and saffron but also including such items as galangal, which only recently has become known again in the West thanks to Thai cuisine.

But spices were far from the only things traded by sea. So, too, were silks, ceramics, cast iron objects and, one can almost certainly assume, oriental carpets.

Over the centuries, many of the East's greatest carpet-producing courts, including those of the Safavid and Mughal Empires, had access to both land and sea-trading routes thanks to their Indian Ocean ports.

The sea often could offer merchants a surer and safer way than roads to get their products to distant markets.

On land, the Silk Roads crossed some of the highest mountains in the world, passed through a multitude of tax-hungry fiefdoms and kingdoms, and required that pack animals get regular fodder and rest.

But on the sea, things could be easier. The captain of a dhow with crew of ten men could use the monsoon winds to make the round trip from the Red Sea to India in 18 months and carry a cargo of twenty to fifty tons. All along the way he could use ports that were in the hands of Muslim rulers who shared a common interest in trade and where traders spoke Arabic as their lingua franca.

Here is a photo of an Arab dhow built in last century but whose design, using wooden planks held together with ropes rather than nails to better survive crashes against coastal rocks, is centuries' old.

The eastern sea routes, and particularly the spice trade, were so profitable that any nations that controlled them could be assured of vast riches. But no single power tried to monopolize them until the rise of Europe's great maritime powers in the 15th century.

Those powers were far away on Europe's Atlantic coast and resented the costly chain of brokers connecting them with the eastern trade. They dreamed of becoming direct participants themselves but for centuries had no way of doing so.

Ironically, their moment came when Europe in general began to learn more about the geography of Eurasia by traveling the Silk Road land routes.

During the Pax Mongolica of the 13th and 14th centuries, when travel on the Silk Road was safest, the first European travelers since Alexander the Great reached India and Marco Polo went as far as China. The tales they brought back inspired the Portuguese to look for route to India south around Africa and the Spanish for a route across the Atlantic.

In 1497, just five years after Columbus crossed the Atlantic to discover the New World, the Portuguese captain Vasco da Gama sailed with four ships past the Cape of Good Hope and began feeling his way up the east coast of Africa. In the African-Arab trading port of Malindi (near Mombasa) he found a local navigator to guide him across the Indian Ocean to Calicut and its huge entrepots of pepper.

For the expedition, Da Gama used the kind of ocean-going caravel that both the Portuguese and the Spanish favored for their early voyages of discovery. It has a shallow draft to chart unknown waters, can sail with or against the wind, and has cargo space for voyages of up to a year.

After Da Gama's success, a larger Portuguese expedition with 13 ships followed and, when the six surviving ones returned to Lisbon laden with pepper in 1501, it was clear to all of Europe that the world would never be the same. Paul Freedman, author the 2008 book Out of the East, Spices and the Medieval Imagination, quotes Venice's envoy in Portugal giving this typical reaction of the time:

"If this routes continues – and it already appears to me easy to accomplish – the king of Portugal might be called the king of money … the entire city [of Venice] remains astonished that in our day such a new route would be discovered, never known or heard of by our ancestors," the envoy, Priuli, wrote.

The Portuguese were able to swiftly dominate the Indian Ocean trade because they had superior firepower and, in Freedman's words, "a willingness, even eagerness, to use force." Fresh from wars with the Moors, they hoped to drive Muslim traders entirely from the sea trade.

Portugal did not have the resources to do that, but it did set up its own trading network that eventually extended from Brazil to Macau on the Chinese coast and other Atlantic powers soon followed suit.

Pictured here is the Basilica Bom Jesus, a Portuguese church erected in Goa, on the west coast of India, which was Lisbon's headquarters in the East.

Curiously, the one world power that could have pre-empted Europe's domination of the sea routes never did so. That was China, which itself sent a huge fleet of war and cargo ships into the Indian Ocean in seven expeditions beginning in 1405 – almost a century before Portugal rounded Africa.

The expeditionary fleets, commanded by Admiral Zheng He, dwarfed Portugal's first voyages of discovery in every respect. His first expedition included 317 vessels and the largest of the ocean-going junks – the treasure ships -- had nine masts on their 122-meter-long (400-foot-long) decks. By contrast, the largest of Da Gama's ships had four masts and was about 30.5 meters (100 feet)long.

This picture shows the relative scale of a treasure ship and a European vessel like those of Da Gama and Columbus.

The Chinese expeditions carried silks, porcelain, and spices and were intended to display the splendor and power of the new Ming dynasty. The expeditions went as far as Persia, Arabia and down the east coast of Africa, and states and leaders that recognized Ming supremacy and offered tribute were rewarded with diplomatic recognition and trading rights.

But the Chinese fleets, which carried artisans, scholars and naturalists as well as sailors and troops, were never about monopolizing trade. Rather they were sent out to explore the world and acquaint it with the Mings. After the last expedition in 1433, China's rulers began to regard the expeditions as too costly and no longer useful. They were confident trade would always flow to China anyway as the Center of the World.

China's approach to sea trade did not change the world, but Europe's did. The Europeans' trading outposts became colonies and their wooden sailing ships evolved into giant ocean steamships. The seas became crisscrossed by ever more vessels, laying the foundations for today's globalized world economy.

These days, there is no doubt that oriental carpets, along with many other goods once traded along the Silk Roads, move west by both sea and land. Most of the handmade carpets exported to Europe arrive at Germany's port of Hamburg, from which many are shipped on to the United States.

The ocean-going carpets are memorialized in Hamburg by one of the few public monuments to the carpet trade that exists in the world today. It is a bridge covered with a stone mosaic in the pattern of a Persian carpet and it lies in the heart of the port's old warehouse district, the Speicherstadt. (For more see: Carpet Made of Stone Honors Hamburg As Europe's Oriental Rug Port.)

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Kuba Weavings: The Art And Appeal Of Africa's Rug-Like Raffia Textiles

KINSHASA, March 26, 2011 -- It's not always easy to tell the difference between a fabric and a rug.

It should be, of course, thanks to some simple rules of thumb.

For example, fabrics are used for clothing and upholstery, while rugs mostly go on the floor.

And while both are woven, fabrics usually don't have a pile like knotted rugs do.

But then one runs into an extraordinary form of weaving which breaks all these simple rules and makes collectors wonder how to display it when they get it home.

That something is a boldly patterned, pile-cloth which is woven from wool-like palm fibers in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

It goes by the name of the people who make it: the Kuba.

Most collectors – and this unusual art form has many – elect to display Kuba weavings by hanging them on the wall, like a prized small rug.

But the Kuba people themselves weave the cloth to make ceremonial dresses worn by both men and women.

For them, it is clearly a fabric and one so prized that people wear the dresses only to attend major events like funerals.

When a person dies, he is buried in one of his dresses so his ancestors will recognize him by the family pattern he wears.

Where does one begin to tell the history of Kuba weaving? Perhaps by noting that it is an ancient tradition about which little is known beyond the last hundred years.

The reason for the short time-frame is that unlike other fabrics, the fine palm fibers from which the cloth is made is as degradable as any other plant. Unless it is carefully preserved in dry conditions, it rarely outlasts its own creator's generation.

Here is a grove of raffia palms, showing the size of the leaves from which the fibers are made.

Ephemeral or not, the Kuba weavings are powerful enough that they have long been prized as trade items by other peoples living around the Kuba's home region.

That region is between the Kasai and Sunkuru rivers, in the west-central part of the DR Congo (formerly Zaire), in a vast area of savannah and forest land that is reachable with a long boat journey from Kinshasa to the river port town of Ilebo.

The subgroup of the Kuba considered to be the best weavers of all is the Shoowa. They were recorded as living here as early as the 17th century.

Margaret Blechman, author of "Discover Shoowa Design," a booklet prepared for the Smithsonian Institution's display of raffia textiles at the National Museum for African Arts in 1988, describes the cloths and their creators this way:

"In the past, raffia textiles were used as money. The Shoowa exchanged them for other goods. Raffia textiles are still worn, enjoyed for their beauty, and kept as treasured possessions.

"For men, a woven and embroidered raffia strip may be used as a decorative border on a wrapper worn for special occasions. For women, several squares of raffia cloth sewn together made a wraparound skirt. At funerals, particularly court funerals great numbers of raffia textiles may be displayed to honor the deceased."

Here is a photo of the Kuba court taken in the mid 1900s.

The first Europeans did not reach the Kuba kingdom until 1890. When they did, they were immediately struck by its elaborate codes of ceremony and dress. So much so, that photo sessions with western magazines like "Life" became de rigeur, with Kuba kings using the opportunity to further the reputation of the Kuba as the foremost artists in central Africa.

The massive amounts of decorative bead-work visible in the photo attests to the wealth the kingdom acquired from trade with neighboring peoples.

The beads themselves are a legacy of the European slave trade, when glass-makers first in Venice and later also in several northern cities manufactured vast quantities of decorative beads as exchange currency to use in Africa and the New World. The slave trade, based on the coasts, did not directly reach the interior Kuba lands but the bead-based economy it created spanned the continent.


To make their rug-like fabrics, the Kuba pound palm fibers until they become soft and threadlike and as easy to dye as wool. The loops of the fine threads are trapped between a warp and weft of sturdier fibers using a loom, and the loops are later cut and trimmed to form an even pile.

Each weaver -- it can be a man or a woman – decides individually whether to make a cloth with a uniform design or vary the designs in midstream, even several times. Traditionally, they do not use preliminary sketches.

What all the weavers do have in common is an agreed vocabulary of shapes, each with its name. Here are just a few: an intertwined loop (called Imbol, or basketworking); a hexagon with or without smaller hexagons inside (Iyul, or tortoise); and a triangle with two angled arcs (Lakiik, or eyebrows).

The shapes can be combined to create intricate mazes that constantly surprise the eye by attracting it in different directions.

After Europeans found the Kuba lands, Kuba textiles began to regularly reach art dealers in Brussels and Paris, who sold them as "African velvets" in the 1920s. Among the artists in Paris who saw them in shops or museums and were particularly drawn to them was Henri Matisse.

Matisse, who was born into a family of textile makers and had a life-long interest in both painting and fabrics, hung panels of Kuba textiles along his studio walls next to the bark cloth he brought back from his 1930s trip to the South Seas.

He wrote in letters to his sister that he often looked at the panels for long periods, waiting for design ideas to come to him.

Art historians say that Matisse's correspondence indicates that the Kuba designs may have been the inspiration for the paper cutouts that were his final major works, such as his 1951 'Snow Flowers'.

The website of New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art notes in an article entitled 'African Influences on Modern Art' that in his cutout collages Matisse blends "a vivid color palette with the allover patterning of the textiles to produce abstract floral forms free-floating in space, creating perspectival shifts between foreground and background."

The abstract patterns displayed in Kuba cloth are equally believed to have served as a source of inspiration for artists such as Klee, Picasso, and Braque.

Probably it should be no surprise that in recent years some rug makers have explored recreating Kuba designs in wool and silk.

Here is one example sold by Landry & Arcari in Boston. The "Shoowa" is a 100 knot rug using Tibetan wool, mohair, and silk and woven in Nepal. It is approximately 6 feet by 8 feet 6 inches in size. (See 'Afro-Tibetan Fusion Rugs' at Landry & Arcari's blog.)

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Related Links:

African Influences In European Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Kuba People, Governors' State University

Kuba Fabrics Online:

Marla Mallet Textiles and Tribal Oriental Rugs

AfricanArt.com

Textiles of Africa

Ethnic Arts

The Niger Bend

Textile Arts

Kanda African Art

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Why Chinese Carpets, Born On The Steppes, Have Classical Chinese Designs

BEIJING, Dec. 18, 2010 – Like the other countries of the ancient Silk Roads, China has a rich carpet tradition.

But it is a younger heritage than those of Central and South Asia or the Middle East and very much unlike them.

Because the first pile carpets in China seem to have been woven only some 500 years ago – in the 15th century -- it seems clear pile carpet weaving arrived to China from elsewhere.

The best guess is that the technique traveled up the Silk Road into northwestern China from neighboring East Turkestan.

Northwestern China was, and is, a vast steppe land peopled mostly by Turkic-Mongol peoples. At that time, these steppe lands, which today include Inner Mongolia, were outside the Great Wall protecting China proper.

So, the early carpets were not ethnically "Chinese" -- in the sense of the Han Chinese who lived within the wall (outlined in red here).

But for reasons that still fascinate historians, they almost immediately became a medium for Chinese – not nomadic – art.

And it is that quality which makes Chinese carpets so unlike their more "oriental" relatives.

Carpet scholars Muray L. Eiland Jr. and Muray Eiland III write in their book Oriental Carpets (1998) that "although it is possible that the pile carpet is not indigenous to China and was introduced from Central Asia, its designs have become as classically Chinese as those of textiles of porcelain.

"The same floral forms, of lotus and chrysanthemum, appear repeatedly, while the same simple devices of frets and swastikas are common in the borders. There is a lavish style of mythical animals and scrolling vines and more styles of the repetition of simple geometric figures."

Here is a carpet showing a mix of floral and geometric figures. The carpet is available to collectors from the Nazmiyal Collection in New York.

The picture at the top of this page is of a naturalistic carpet from around the northwestern town of Ningxia.

That the carpets should become so classically Chinese is surprising because the steppe lands -- which are a rich wool producing region -- had a millennia-old tradition of felt carpet making with its own rich vocabulary of motifs.

But it may be that by the 15th century, the people of northwest China already were heavily influenced by the overwhelming culture of China proper.

It is likely, too, that in many of the main commercial centers for the rugs, such as Ningxia right beside the Great Wall, urban populations were already ethnically mixed.

The rugs woven in northwest China had several markets.

One market was the nomadic lands to the north, Mongolia and beyond, where the rugs were used to decorate yurts.

A second market was Chinese Muslims who needed substitutes for prayer rugs, which were not woven in China.

And the third and richest market – and the one which undoubtedly did the most to determine styles and designs -- was temples and noble homes.

Ningxia rugs, for example, were used extensively in the monasteries of Tibet and northwest China. The temple carpets included Banner rugs, Hanging rugs, Curtain carpets and Pillar carpets.

The Pillar carpets were sometimes made in two halves to fit around a column. Picture here is a column carpet from the 1880s in the Victoria and Albert Museum's collection.

Interestingly, special colors were reserved for special audiences. Yellow was reserved for royal use, such the court and temples, while red was for gift carpets exchanged between aristocrats.

But if these pile carpets are so distinctly Chinese in appearance, does it mean that the indigenous people of the northwest contributed no influence of their own?

Hans Bidder, a German diplomat and carpet historian who lived many years in China before his death in 1963, believes the felt carpet culture of the steppe lands had a great effect on how the pile woven carpets were decorated.

Bidder is particularly intrigued by the way the fields of Chinese carpets so often appear to be blank canvases upon which motifs – from animals to Taoist and Buddhist symbols – are placed in almost 'applique' fashion.

Shown here is a carpet from the northwestern city of Baotou (or Paotou) showing objects in sharp contrast with their background.

Often the motifs stand out so dramatically from the background that almost appear to have been inlaid into the field of the carpet the way motifs are rolled and pressed into the plain backgrounds of felt carpets.

The appearance is sometimes heightened by cutting the pile to put the motifs in even higher relief – a practice that remains very common in Chinese carpets today.

That preference for high relief makes a fascinating link not only to the art sensibilities of the nomadic felt makers but also to a period in China's own history when – due to the Mongol conquests of the 13th century – felt carpets briefly and unexpectedly rose to the level of a court art in Beijing.

Bidder writes that "during the period of Mongol Chinese rule (1260 to 1341) the felt carpet developed into a very luxurious object."

He continues, "in the year 1299 felt carpets with an area of 331 square meters were manufactured for the 'Palace of the Special Chambers' (imperial harem) … felts became so refined and improved in quality that the artistry of felt carpets finally equaled that of the best Oriental carpets and sometimes exceeded it." (Bidder, Carpets from Eastern Turkestan, published 1964.)

It is interesting to speculate on how much this experience may have helped set the subsequent taste for bold, high-relief motifs on knotted rugs. But the impact of Mongol rule on Chinese rugs may have been still larger than that.

Bidder notes that ancient China – the Han peoples within the Great Wall – traditionally associated wool with the barbarian world. Their fabrics of choice were cotton and silk, instead.

Here is a Ming Dynasty carpet that looks much like a silk robe in its pattern.

It was only through centuries of contact with nomads on the northern border that Chinese slowly began to adopt the use of felt mats as utilitarian floor coverings or insulation padding on beds. The example of the Mongol court would have done much to convince Chinese to regard wool as an artistic medium, as well.

Still, when weaving looms for carpets arrived in China, many people still regarded them as something alien.

Bidder, a scholar of Chinese texts, cites the earliest known mention of the technology as noting the "weaving process has been taken over from the barbarians and is performed in their strange way." The book was written sometime in the Ming period of the 14th to 17th centuries.

But if wool carpet weaving took hold relatively late in China, it rapidly developed into a major industry.

The most active centers in the northwest – the ones most early carpets are named after – became the provinces of Kansu, Ningxia, and Suiyan (a now defunct province located in today's Inner Mongolia), as well as another part of Inner Mongolia near the city of Baotou (or Paotou)

These centers thrived in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, setting the stage for the phenomenal growth of the Chinese export carpet industry when China opened to the world and major new weaving centers appeared in Peking and its nearby port Tiantsin.

From historical records, it appears wool looms appeared in Beijing in the early 1860s. There carpet-maker developed new patterns based on Ningxia carpet designs but which progressively responded to Western market demands.

Like the earlier Chinese carpets, the new Peking rugs depicted Chinese symbols and designs used for hundreds of years.

But where the symbols tended to be profuse and cluttered together on domestic rugs, the new rugs spaced them out -- usually around a central medallion -- in harmonious designs more suited to western tastes.

Blue Peking rugs made in Western room sizes gained huge popularity, particularly in America. They were followed by other rugs directly produced for the American market, often by companies owned by American expatriates in China.

The most famous of these "American" exports were the Chinese Art Deco rugs of the 1920s and 1930s. But their success is another story (see: The Jazz Age: Gowns, Tuxedos, And Chinese Art Deco Carpets).

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Khotan Carpets And The Lost Legacy Of The Silk Roads

KHOTAN, East Turkestan; Dec. 4, 2010 -- In the center of the Asian continent is one of the world's most isolated places.

It is a huge region – larger than Western Europe – and has a millennia-old carpet weaving tradition. Yet even today it is little known in the West because it is so remote.

The place is known historically as East Turkestan and, today, comprises China's eastern-most province, Xinjiang.

From any direction, East Turkestan is hard to reach.

Its heartland, the Tarim Basin, is ringed on three sides -- north, west and south -- by mountain peaks up to 6,000 meters (20,000 feet) high, or about half again the height of Europe's Mont Blanc. That walls it off from Central Asia, Pakistan, and Tibet.

On the fourth side, a vast desert cuts it off from China proper to the east.

But over the millennia, this remote place attracted waves of settlers from all directions. And it was the pivot point of the Silk Roads, where the route from China branched south to India, north to Central Asia, and west to Persia, Anatolia, and Europe.

The history of fused cultures can clearly be seen in East Turkestan's rugs and is what makes them both so fascinating and sui generis.

One example is the rug from the town of Khotan shown at the top of this article. At first glance, it looks vaguely Islamic, vaguely Chinese, and vaguely Indian. In fact, it is all three.

Here is a map of the Tarim Basin, showing Khotan (here spelled Ho-t'ien) at the center of the Tarim Basin's southern edge.

Khotan and all the other major towns of the region are oases fed by mountain rivers that disappear into the Taklamakan desert at the basin's center.

Appreciating East Turkestan's carpets means peeling back layers of history, perhaps to about 1,500 to 1,000 BC. That is when historians believe the earliest agrarian settlers began penetrating into East Turkestan which, at the time, was dominated by Turkic nomads.

The settlers were Indo-Europeans who were members of the same peoples of greater Persia whose wars with the Turkic nomads are chronicled in Persia's epic poem, the Shahnameh. They lived in the oasis towns and adopted Buddhism from India while the nomads roamed over the mountain slopes.

Here is a picture of another Khotan carpet. The carpet is available to collectors from the Nazmiyal Collection in New York.

The medallions are called Ay Gul, or "moon" motif, and are arranged in a pattern reminiscent of the three lotus seats on which Buddha flanked by two Bodhisattvas is represented in temple art. The border recalls nomadic felt carpet traditions.

Just when weaving began in East Turkestan is unknown. But Western archaeologists have dated the earliest pile carpet fragments found in the Tarim Basin to about the third century AD. The fragments were found at Buddhist sites excavated by Sir Aurel Stein in Niya, an oasis east of Khotan, around 1900.

During their history, the Buddhist oasis towns would be repeatedly overrun by powerful Turkic nomadic confederations, notably the Hsiung-nu (or Xiongnu) in the second century BC. But the nomads were content to levy tribute without changing the towns' culture or their role as middlemen for the Silk Roads.

Similarly, China, which increasingly dominated the oasis states from the second to fourth centuries BC, had no interest at that time in colonizing or in spreading Chinese culture to them, unlike today.

Instead, the Chinese were interested in maintaining garrisons to guard their Silk Road trade and assure their own imports of jade, which the mountain rivers bring down to the Tarim Basin. Whenever the rival Tibetan Empire displaced the Chinese, it too left the oasis states largely independent.

The first real changes came about with the waves of Turkic conquests which began in the ninth century as huge new confederations of nomads mobilized for the westward migrations that would change the face of Eurasia.

As the Turkic tribes adopted Islam, they also forced the conversion of the Buddhist oases, imposed their language, and created East Turkestan as we know it now.

But if the conquests and later settling of the region by the Turks, and definitively by the Uigur Turks, brought new religious and cultural influences, it did not mean the end of the old artistic ones.

Rug expert Hans Bidder writes in his landmark book Carpets from Eastern Turkestan (1964):

"Iconoclastic Islam which spread into the oases from middle of the 10th century was indeed able to subdue the religious art of Buddhism, but the new faith proved incapable of gaining any hold upon individual arts and crafts which had their roots in the traditional customs and economic existence of the oases.

"The old carpet weaving craft in Khotan, for example, whose precious fund of designs had been influenced by ten centuries of Indo-Grecian art, freely continued its own path of natural development."

Here is another Khotan carpet, this one in a "coffered gul" pattern.

Bidder writes that "the coffered gul design, so characteristic of Khotan, dates back to either the Gandhara-Buddhism period, or to an even earlier epoch." (Gandhara, stretching from Kabul to Peshawar, reached its height under Buddhist kings from the 1st to 5th centuries AD.)

He observes that the rosettes in the coffer boxes may be a floral "Khotan modification of a Turkoman Gul," while the border – with its curious multi-colored disintegrating design is Indian-influenced.

Another major influence in the design of many East Turkestan rugs was undoubtedly the patterns on Chinese silks that passed up and down the trade routes.

East Turkestan's carpet trade flourished through the middle ages and into the early modern era as the courts of Turkic rulers patronized the carpet workrooms of the oases. The carpets also found markets in India, Persia and Central Asia as part of the Silk Road trade and absorbed new influences from them in exchange.

But when China occupied the whole of East Turkmenistan in the 1750s, things changed radically. The Chinese court had little interest in pile carpets beyond receiving them as diplomatic gifts and Chinese homes made no use of them at all.

Worse, East Turkestan's incorporation into China cut its economic connections with the west. Commercial weavers who previously imported dyes from India were cut off both from their supplies and their best route for connecting to the fast growing rug market of 19th century Europe.

Here is a photo of one of the most common East Turkestan patterns. It is a carpet woven in Yarkand with a pomegranate-vase design. This and other designs were also woven in the best known of the oasis towns, Kashgar.

Those carpets from East Turkestan which did make their way west usually did so via the mountains into the Russian Empire and on to Central Asia's great carpet market in Samarkand.

By the time they reached Europe, they were generically – along with other Central Asian rugs – termed "Samarkands" and their identity was lost.

Similarly, if they went to Europe via oriental arts dealers in Beijing, they were called Kanju after one of the provinces they passed through on their way to the Chinese capital. That name, too, told nothing of their real origin.

Today, after decades of an isolated and then re-opened communist China, the weaving industry of East Turkestan is so weak that it offers little for carpet enthusiasts.

Commercial workshops are as likely to produce knock-offs of Persian carpets as copies of the region's own designs. If traditional carpets are woven for home use in any numbers, they are rarely seen or remarked upon by travelers.

But the fact that weaving still exists at all in a place so long forgotten by the world's carpet markets is something of a miracle.

Considering how many millennia and changes East Turkestan's weaving culture has already survived, it would be wrong to count it out now.

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Khotan Rugs: Samuel's Antique Rug Gallery


Khotan Rugs: Doris Leslie Blau's 'Samarkand' Gallery

Rags To Riches: The North American Art Of Hooked Rugs

BOSTON, November 20, 2010 -- It is always fascinating to see how rugs in so many parts of the world originated as practical necessities but evolved into items of art.

One example is hooked rugs.

They are a peculiarly North American creation that began as floor coverings and today are just as likely to be prized wall hangings.

In the process, they have become one of the more enduring handcrafts in Canada and the United States and a medium for endless creativity.

Just how wide ranging they can be is shown in the rug below by Massachusetts artist Margaret Arraj.

It is in the style of a Khotan carpet from east Turkestan in the 1700s, inspired by the original in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Arraj, whose rugs are for sale at her website Mill River Rugs is particularly interested in ethnic floral designs and old textiles.

As she says, her designs “honor the artistic life and tradition of a variety of countries. In this way, they bring us closer to other cultures and times.”

But most hooked rugs do not wander so far from home.

Instead, they take their themes from North American folk culture as they depict flowers, wildlife, people, historical events, geometric patterns or simply express the imagination of the artist.

And in that way, hooked rugs today remain surprisingly close to their origins in the in the 19th century.

Just how hooked rugs evolved in the 1800s is a fascinating story.

Author William Winthrop Kent writes that the earliest forebears of hooked rugs were the floor mats made in Yorkshire, England in the early days of the industrial revolution.

At that time, workers in weaving mills were allowed to collect the excess pieces of yarn that were by-products of the work. The pieces, which were called “thrums” and usually some 9 inches (23 cm) long, were valuable to the workers because yarn in general was expensive and the products of the mills were affordable only to the middle and upper classes.

The mill workers put the thrums to good use.

They pulled the strips of yarn, one by one, through a grid backing to make carpets. The backing was linen or burlap or any other such heavy material and the tool for pulling the yarn through was a simple hook with a wooden handle.

Later, this technique transferred to North America, specifically to New England and the Canadian Maritimes, and flourished.

It became a favorite way for poorer households in these regions to produce colorful floor covering at a time when most 19th century homes had unsightly floors that were hastily cobbled together by the builders from softwood boards of random sizes.

Because yarn was expensive, and always saved for knitting sweaters, poor families without access to thrums usually made their hooked rugs using scraps of ordinary cloth.

But no matter what fabric was used, the hooked rugs were more attractive than the common alternative at the time: inexpensive mats woven from coconut fiber, straw, or corn husks.

Here is an antique hooked rug. It is available to collectors from the Nazmiyal Collection in New York.

One might expect hooked rugs to have died out once machine-powered carpet weaving, invented in the 1830s, developed sufficiently to produce cheap carpeting in massive volumes. And by the 1870s, machine weaving was doing just that to solve people’s flooring problems.

But instead of disappearing, the pastime of “hooking rugs” passed from being a household chore into a hobby.

Over time, as standards of living improved with the industrial revolution, the materials used in the rugs also upgraded.

By the 1930s, when artists and author Pearl McGown widely popularized the art by publishing formal guidelines for it, the “pile” material had become wool strips and the rugs – as they are still called – had become wall hangings.

In their heyday as a floor covering, hooked rugs were often produced by poorer families and even businesses for sale commercially.

The most ambitious products were hooked carpets of living-room size.

Here is an antique hooked rug – 12.5 feet by 16 feet (3.8 x 4.8 meters) – designed in the style of a baroque European carpet.

Such old pieces today are highly prized and are sold by some dealers in North America as “American Hooked” rugs right alongside antique oriental ones.

And, because there is not enough supply of the large antique hooked rugs to meet demand, there is also a market for reproductions. That's as some American decorators try to recapture the look of New England homes of days gone by, particularly for vacation cottages.

The commercial reproductions, made outside of North America, exist side-by-side with the very active output of rug hooking hobbyists and artists across Canada and the United States.

As always, the hobbyists continue to hook rugs for their friends and family but, unfortunately, only rarely for sale.

For a video demonstration of how hooked rugs are made, and examples of folk art motifs, click on this YouTube link:



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Related Links:

Mill River Rugs: Gallery of New Hooked Rugs

Absolute Rugs: Gallery of Antique Hooked Rugs

Gene Shepherd Rug Hooking Video

Attend the 12th ICOC in Sparkling Stockholm: June 16-19, 2011

By Dennis Dodds, Secretary General of the ICOC

We invite you join us for the International Conference on Oriental Carpets' big events in Stockholm, Copenhagen and St. Petersburg. The deadline for the 'Early Bird' Registration discount is just 30 days away!

Book before December 1st and enjoy considerable savings. At the conference, hear educational lectures from international experts, greet old friends and meet new ones. Visit a robust International Dealers’ Fair of antique rugs and see exhibitions of Caucasian, Anatolian and Persian rugs and textiles from private collections. A special display of rare Turkmen carpets and trappings is also being organized.

Feast your eyes on the world famous ‘Marby’ rug (pictured here) and 17th century Turkish ‘Transylvanian’ rugs, glorious "Polonaise" carpets, tapestries, colorful 18th century Swedish folk textiles and the exquisite Safavid silk velvet coat that belonged to Queen Christina...and this is just a sampling!

Visits to several museum exhibitions include the Royal Palace with their vast collections of fine art. Day-excursions to Stockholm’s many splendid cultural and historic sites will be available.

An art-filled pre-conference tour takes you to Copenhagen, Denmark and the incomparable David Collection, considered one of the world’s finest collections of Islamic art, including carpets and textiles.

Your amazing post-conference tour of 5 nights and 4 fabulous days to the incomparable city of St. Petersburg, Russia, will cap off an unforgettable ICOC experience. See the Pazyryk carpet and other rare textiles, carpets and collections of great art in the magnificent setting of the Hermitage Museum, with informative programs presented exclusively for ICOC participants. An exhibition of Central Asian carpet masterpieces from the Russian Ethnographic Museum’s celebrated vaults, the Kunstkamera Museum of Peter the Great and tours of Czarist country palaces will make this a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

Evenings in Stockholm, Copenhagen and St. Petersburg (with its ‘white nights’) will be filled with festive receptions. June is an ideal time to visit these wonderful cities with their rivers, canals and cultural attractions. Please join us in making this 12th ICOC an educational and memorable travel experience. For more general information about ICOC, go to: www.ICOC-orientalrugs.org

To book your discount registration before the deadline, go to: www.ICOC2011stockholm.se

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Kabul's Old City Gets A Facelift

KABUL, October 16, 2010 -- Kabul has been so damaged by wars and pell-mell rebuilding that it's hard to remember this was once a pretty city with elegant mud-brick mansions, elaborate carved-wood lattice windows, and shady courtyards.

But some of the old neighborhoods still exist, hidden away in what today are the poorest parts of town.

To find them means going to the very center of Kabul, where a bazaar the locals call "Titanic" appears each summer in the dry gulch of the Kabul River, then disappears again with the spring floods.

There, you have to duck behind the Soviet-era buildings and concrete-box shops surrounding the bazaar and plunge into a labyrinth of smoky, noisy lanes. As the smoke from the blacksmiths' forges stings your eyes and the hammering rings in your ears, you reach the neighborhood of Murad Khane.

For decades, this neighborhood of once-grand homes was so neglected that it literally fell into ruin. The mud-brick homes crumbled around the residents as they became too destitute to repair them. Some of the largest homes turned into cheap warehouse space for the nearby bazaar and their courtyards became dumping sites for trash from other parts of town.

But now, Murad Khane is reviving. Since 2006, it has been the focus of a major renovation effort funded mostly by private international donors. And as its buildings return to view, the neighborhood is becoming one of the city's most charming historical treasures.

Rory Brown, the development officer for the project, says the task of just digging out the trash has been prodigious. "Since 2006, we have removed almost 20,000 cubic meters of rubbish from the streets, courtyards, and sites of collapsed buildings in Murad Khane," he says. "In places, that has meant the street level has dropped by up to 2 meters."

Here is a picture of one of the neighborhood's landmark buildings, the "Peacock House," after extensive restoration. A 'before' picture of the house is at the top of this article.

The recovery is part of a $25 million effort by the Kabul-based Turquoise Mountain project and the brainchild of two well-known British personalities.

One is the Prince of Wales, who famously dislikes modern architecture, and the other is Rory Stewart, Turquoise Mountain's founder. Stewart walked across Afghanistan shortly after the fall of the Taliban to write the best-selling book "The Places In Between" and, like Prince Charles, admires Afghanistan's cultural and artistic traditions and wants to help revive them.

The Peacock House is named for the motif of peacocks that appears on its carved wood facade. Like many of the other landmark buildings in Murad Khane, it dates to the 1920s, when dozens of buildings with elaborate wood carvings were erected by rich families.

The district itself was long associated with the royal palace that stands nearby. Afghanistan's founding ruler, Ahmad Shah Durrani, built several buildings there in the 18th century to house members of his court and it remained a prestigious address for centuries afterward.

The aim in restoring Murad Khane now is both to save the centrally located district from being bulldozed to make room for new buildings and to find a new life for some of the finest structures as a crafts school. Fifteen of the buildings will provide the campus of the Institute for Afghan Arts and Architecture, which will not only teach new generations of artisans but also help provide a sustainable economy for the rest of the district.

This student at the Institute for Afghan Arts and Architecture practices calligraphy.

At the same time, the urban-renewal project has built a primary school in Murad Khane, provided the neighborhood with electricity, water, sewerage, emergency repairs on private houses, and now is completing a women's community center. All the work has created near full employment in the neighborhood.

In one of the restored buildings, the institute's ceramic school is already up and running. Its teacher and headmaster is Abdul Matin, who graduated from the school last year.

Matin says one of the most difficult things for the students to master is the traditional glaze that gives Afghan ceramics their characteristic blue-green coloring. The glaze is based on a plant that grows in northern Afghanistan called "gaz" and which requires many steps to process before it delivers a rich range of colors from yellow to green.

"Actually, we don't burn the [plants] ourselves, but the people of Hairaton in [northern] Balkh Province collect them, ignite them, and collect their coal," Matin says. "We purchase the coal, then we heat it by adding some special products and next crush the coal into powder in a special machine. Once we have the powder, we can use it as a glaze."

Matin, a native of the nearby village of Istalif, which is traditionally famous for its ceramics, operates his own pottery business in addition to teaching. His studies at the school prepared him to do that by including not just pottery classes in the three-year curriculum but also general art history and design classes, business classes, and even English-language lessons.

Pictured here is one of the woodwork teachers at the Institute for Afghan Arts and Architecture.

The comprehensive education the school offers has made it a magnet for would-be artisans across the country, despite its small size. The total student body is only 120 students, with some 30 places in each of the four craft areas of ceramics, woodworking, jewelry-making, and miniature-painting.

Khan Etebari, a spokesman for Turquoise Mountain, says each year the Institute for Afghan Arts and Architecture gets hundreds more applicants than it has places.

"Each year we announce the process of institute enrollment and on the average we receive between 800 up to 1,200 applications for 30 seats," Etebari says.

Unlike traditional apprenticeship programs in Afghanistan, where a student begins to study under a master at 12 and completes his training with almost no other education by 18, the new art institute only takes students who already have graduated from high school. The arts-and-crafts education at the institute is so complete that it has received Britain's demanding City and Guilds Accreditation, which certifies the quality of the students' work.

For now, as reconstruction in Murad Khane continues, the institute's three other schools remain housed in an old fort the Turquoise Mountain renovated elsewhere in Kabul as a temporary quarters. The older students there may or may not ever see the new campus being prepared for them before they graduate.

Here is one of the restored buildings in Murad Khane that will serve as part of the new campus of the arts school.

But the teachers say that all the students of the new art institute have one thing in common that previous generations of artisans in Afghanistan lacked. That is, the possibility of making a successful commercial living in their own country when previously many had to flee to find work elsewhere.

Haji Aslam, the head of the school of jewelry and gem-cutting, was trained by his father, who was a jeweler to the Afghan court. But he spent much of his own professional life as a refugee in Pakistan because of Afghanistan's recent decades of turmoil.

"[The economy] wasn't good, it was collapsing, and then all of us became refugees and headed toward the neighboring countries of Pakistan and Iran because there was a big fight here," Aslam says. "Our own home got hit with a rocket; my kids were injured and we couldn't live here."

Aslam says that today the jewelry business is good in Kabul, for both modern and traditional styles, and he believes his students will not have to live as he did.

It is an optimistic thought in a country still struggling with an insurgency and major economic problems. But such optimism seems fully at home in the newly awakened neighborhood of Murad Khane.

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Related Links:

Turquoise Mountain Foundation