10'10" x 16'4" Chinese Peking Rug | Antique Art Deco | 1930s Ivory Field with Pagoda Medallion

A room-filling antique from the 1930s, this 10'10" x 16'4" Peking rug is built the way the best Beijing workshops built for export: hand-knotted wool pile on a cotton foundation, an almost bare ivory field, and every bit of drawing pushed to the border and one small roundel at the center. Pieces this large in the Art Deco Chinese idiom are uncommon, and clean examples with the field still open and unworn are harder still, which puts it squarely among the oversize antique rugs worth holding. It ships with a certificate of authenticity documenting age, origin, materials and measurements.

Design and Motifs

The composition is a study in restraint. A single round roundel sits at the center, filled with a miniature landscape: a tiered pagoda, a pavilion with a tiled roof, garden walls drawn in ivory brickwork, bamboo sprays, scrolling cloud forms and scattered berry clusters, all outlined in dark wool against the pale ground. All 4 corners carry pictorial spandrels that echo the same scene at larger scale, with pavilions, flowering branches and cloud-edged rockwork spilling in from the border. The main border is a procession of scholar objects and vessels: lidded jars, footed vases, planters holding prunus and chrysanthemum, paired birds with outstretched wings, and small endless knot and longevity symbols spaced between them. A narrow mid-blue guard band separates border from field and carries its own line of knot emblems. Everything else is left open, which is exactly what makes the Art Deco Peking format so easy to furnish around.

A Two-Tone Palette of Ivory and Indigo

The field is a warm ivory that shades toward soft camel where the pile catches the light, the kind of gentle tonal movement old vegetable-toned wool develops over 90 years. Against it the border reads deep indigo, almost black at the outer edge, with a clear mid-blue guard band that lifts the whole frame. Inside the drawing the blues step through at least 3 values: near-black outlines, a saturated royal blue for roofs and rockwork, and a chalky sky blue for roof tiles, leaves and pavilion awnings. Small accents of dusty peach and coral appear in the blossoms, with ivory and taupe for the brickwork, vases and twigs. There is no red anywhere, which is what separates a Peking palette from most other antique Oriental work and why this rug settles so quietly into rooms with blue and white porcelain, pale plaster walls or dark timber floors.

Peking Weaving and the Art Deco Years

Peking, now Beijing, was the center of Chinese workshop weaving through the 1920s and 1930s, when looms there produced large formats specifically for American and European interiors. Those years gave us the open-field Deco style seen here: fewer motifs, more breathing room, and a heavy lustrous wool pile clipped low enough to keep the outlines crisp. The back of this piece shows a steady, even knot line across a cotton warp and weft, the disciplined workshop weave rather than village work, and the handle is substantial without being stiff. For a buyer comparing this against Persian production of the same era, the drawing vocabulary is completely different even though the construction standards overlap; our guide on what actually separates a Persian from an Oriental rug is the quickest way to see where this one sits.