China Corners Carpet Market

China Corners Carpet Market
No need to go far for a fine Persian rug
(By SEAN O'CONNER)

I saw an advertisement for a 30-foot by 30-foot silk Persian carpet in a pan-Middle Eastern newspaper recently with the punch line "If your palace needs it, contact us." Palaces and carpet weavers are synonymous with the oil-soaked Middle East. As an occasional collector of Oriental rugs, I was stunned to learn the attention-grabbing advert wasn’t placed by an Iranian or Turkish carpet magnate, but rather by a factory in central China’s Henan Province.
Based in Zhengzhou, the populous provincial capital, carpet maker Henan Yilong Carpet Co. draws customers from theUnited Arab Emirates and Libya, countries steeped in carpet-weaving tradition. Factory-made Persian carpets have become affordable centerpieces for China’s millions of new apartment owners. As with cars and clothes, China may be using its assembly lines to churn out copies of Persian rugs, treasured heirlooms in Iran, where craftsmen often take months to weave one 3-meter by 4-meter rug.

But that’s not the full story. While cheap, manufactured rugs lack the precision and charm of hand woven originals and are usually of a gaudy hue, some of China’s carpet makers are drawing on a local tradition in carpet making to compete on quality. Henan has a thousand-year-old tradition of making silk carpets. I hadn’t realized how rich the local carpet making tradition was until I started to visit some of the carpet shops in Beijing selling this rather less well-known counterpart of the more celebrated Persian and Turkish rugs.

Curiosity took me to Henan to visit Yilong, which sells its wares in the United States and the EU. The firm, located outside Zhengzhou, charges top dollar for its weaves.

In business since 1987, Yilong claims to be China’s largest producer and exporter of handmade Persian carpets. While I was there, several Arab customers thumbed carpets stacked in neat piles in its warehouses.

Yilong’s 2,600 carpet weavers, many of them working out of their own homes, make carpets based on the company’s own 500 distinct Persian-style designs. The firm exports an average $12 million worth of carpets a year to 35 countries, the bulk of them in the Middle East. Yilong also sells in Europe, and counts respected London carpet retailer Leon Norrell among its clients.

Today it churns out factory made copies of Persian and Turkish motifs, but China has a proud carpet-making heritage of its own, partly a legacy from the period when China and Persia were both ruled by the Mongol regime in the 13th and 14th centuries, who disseminated crafts like carpet making and porcelain, unique to certain territories within the Mongol empire. But carpet making in China was largely restricted to weaving traditional Chinese motifs such as the phoenix and dragon into carpets for the royal court. Many of those rugs were woven in Henan, but even there the carpet making crafts died out last century

Hence China’s new industrial-scale carpet makers like Yilong lack the lore and tradition of Turkish or Iranian carpet makers, which are often small village enterprises staffed by generations of skilled weavers. Certainly, Yilong has scale on its side. The firm completes 100,000 square feet of silk carpets every year, the most intricate of which sell for up to $20,000. True to its industrial roots, Yilong buffers its revenues by manufacturing artificial silk carpets as well as wool Aubusson carpets and tapestries.

A more village-scale carpet making tradition has survived in some parts of the country. Exquisite silk and woolen carpets are woven on looms in Hotan, a dusty town in southwest Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, featuring local Uygur and Han Chinese motifs. Aside from native Xinjiang weaves, village-woven Tibetan carpets have become prized by collectors for their thick wool and clear geometric motifs.

From Kashgar, a predominantly Muslim city on China’s western fringes, my carpet-dealing friend Wahapjan is probablyBeijing’s youngest and most consummate connoisseur of the real thing. A member of China’s Uygur ethnic group, the youthful rug connoisseur couriers his woolen carpets overland, through neighboring Pakistan, from well-established contacts in Afghanistan’s Baluchistan and Herat regions.

At Wahapjan’s store, around the corner from the City Hotel in Beijing’s Sanlitun entertainment district, a 2-meter by 3.5-meter woolen Hotan rug sells for $600. That’s good value compared to the rates charged in antiseptic carpet stores inDubai or New York. Beijing’s embassies have been particularly keen buyers, he says. "Local Chinese people find the colors too dark or the carpet too expensive."

So China, I discovered, is a good place for carpet connoisseurs. Alternatively, collectors can take the weekly Air Iranflight to Tehran on Thursdays and Sundays. There’s some merit to Yilong’s claim to be the world’s biggest carpet maker, given the kind of clientele it’s drawing from the Middle East.

But rather than making copies of others’ motifs, China should nourish its own carpet making traditions. I’d much prefer an authentic Henan weave on my floor than a pale Persian imitation.