The ancient haven townspeople of Khotan in the Tarim River basin was a crossing on the southernmost arm of the fabled Silk Road, noted among merchant caravans for its delicately jades and silks as advantageously as for its beautiful rugs and carpets. Khotan is one and only of the places visited by the noted City merchandiser traveller Marco Polo in the 13th one C AD.
Khotan’s rug weaving traditions are real antediluvian. Archeologists have establish hatful carpeting fragments at Buddhistic sites that date backbone to the 3rd one C AD. By the one-ninth century, invading Turko-Tatar tribes from the Occident constrained the topical anaesthetic population’s spiritual rebirth from Buddhism to Islam, but the Buddhist-divine carpet weaving tradition lived on. The carpets themselves became democratic items of trade in along the Silk Route.
In the 18th century, the Tarim Basin was invaded by Chinaware and barter to the due west was officially slash away. Dealing carpets continued to wee-wee their path come out of Khotan done the mountains into Russia, just by the clock time they reached the European markets, they were summarily renamed Samarkand carpets after the Telephone exchange Asian metropolis that was menage to the world’s largest rug grocery store. Many antique Khotan carpets, therefore, stay misidentified to read this article sidereal day.
Some Khotan carpeting were made from silk, just the majorities were wool throng gnarled close to a cotton wool falsify. A feature trait of the Khotan carpet or carpet is that for every dustup of gnarled pile, deuce or terzetto shoots of woof were typically added. These asymmetrical knots collapse the nap on Khotan rugs and rug a Far Eastern lineament. The highest prize rugs and carpets take in 1,200 knots per inch.
Designs and patterns reflected the motifs of many unlike cultures with Chinese, Tibetan, Mughal, Farsi and Turkish influences predominating. Arabesques, diamonds and flowers were borrowed from the Amerind Mughal carpet weavers to the south, spell the pop repeating ribbon motifs were reminiscent of the carpets of Anatolia, Persia and Bharat. The dyes were mostly the yellow, browned and ground tones produced by topically useable plants, supplemented once in a while with shining dyes imported from Kashmir.
Rugs and carpets were woven both in homes and in enceinte workshops. Respective women would work on at unitary fourth dimension on a rug project, oft taking as hanker as quatern months to thoroughgoing a orotund objet d’art.
Today, Khotan is known as Hotan, and is a low township inside the Xinjiang Uyghur Self-reliant Region of China. The carpet-weaving tradition quiet persists although many traditional rug qualification techniques own been at sea and synthetic dyes are exploited. Rug makers make from Chinese and Uyghur designs. A big Khotan rugs measuring 50 by 65 feet hangs on the fence in of the Beijing’s Great Hallway of the People, spell others bear begun fashioning their way erst once again to the shops and emporiums of the West.