A new kind of oriental rug emerged from India in the late 1990s, the so-called tea-wash carpet. In the final step of the finishing process, carpets like this are washed in tea and sometimes henna — two natural dyes, after all — to soften their colors.

9/9 Jaipurs, as they are known to those in the oriental rug industry, have become immensely popular in the U.S. market. The name refers not just to the knot count (9 x 9 = 81 knots per square inch) but the Indian city where they are manufactured. Canny marketeers — or perhaps hundreds of retailers on their own initiative — have succeeded in making them known to the public as tea-dyed or tea-washed rugs.

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This 12 by 18-foot Indo-Kashan (Kashan made in India) is a perfect example of the excellent and beautiful new Oriental rugs coming out of India today. This carpet, imported by the Henry Gertmenian Company of San Francisco, was based on a Persian Kashan that in turn was based on a sixteenth-century Persian vase carpet.

The Henry Gertmenian Company of San Francisco is one my favorite importers of what we call “mainstream” Indian rugs. These are handmade Oriental rugs with mostly Persian designs, good synthetic dyes and machine-spun wool, and a typical knot-count of between 100 and 200 knots per square inch.

Al Gertmenian, who gave up a law practice to join the family carpet business in 1980, is one of those rare souls who radiate honesty. In the company, he is in charge of importing rugs from India. During the early 1980s he would examine dozens of lines, and be happy to find one he liked well enough to buy. At the hotel that night he would wonder who in the world bought the other ones — the rugs he passed over. Today, of fifteen lines of rugs he examines, he may like twelve.

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A new “tree of life” rug made in India.

The rugs of India have gotten leagues better in the past quarter century. Oriental rug lovers everywhere have started to notice.

In 2000, India exported $190 million worth of carpets to the United States. Yet rug collectors and even many rug dealers know almost nothing about the rug industry in India. My early education in Oriental rugs came at a time when Indian rugs were considered not quite authentic, and rug books barely gave them a mention. Like many other old-school rug collectors, I can draw a map of Iran, argue price in Farsi, and discuss the output of obscure Persian villages. But I was appallingly uninformed about Indian rug production.

Like Pakistan, India is not generally supposed to have a rugmaking tradition. No such misunderstanding should survive the superb exhibition of Mughal carpets of the late sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries mounted in 1998 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Though Mughal rug designers were certainly influenced by Persian court rugs, they also appear to have emulated the designs of textiles native to northwest India. Mughal carpets are not merely Persian rugs woven in India; they have their own discernibly Indian look.

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Pakistani Sultanabad by I.M. International, 8 feet 7 inches by 11 feet 8 inches.

As I was finishing the first edition of this book, a new Pakistani production was coming on line called I. M. International. We had seen the company’s first rugs and were so impressed that we suggested they were among the best in the world. I. M. International has lived up to its promise.

Today the company is a major force in the rug world, contributing scores of designs, all of them superior to ordinary Pakistani natural-dye carpets. Turkish-born Izi Mizrahi produced rugs in his native country for fifteen years before moving production to the Afghan refugee camps of Pakistan. There he has made them mostly in Persian and Caucasian designs with natural dyes and hand-spun wool. His color choices are consistently good; his carpets have good body; his quality control is among the best; his rugs have a nice, old look; the best of them are simply gorgeous.

A Pakistani Karadja rug by I.M. International. It’s hard to imagine that its 100-year-old prototype from north Persia was any more attractive than this.

This luscious rug was produced by an emerging company called Q Mark in Pakistan, woven by Afghan refugees.

Q Mark and Pamir have woven rugs for in Pakistan for several years and are just now emerging with good, new productions. Hazara looms have put production on hold due to a migration of weavers back to Afghanistan.

In its dynamism, the Oriental rug industry now is reminiscent of the dot-com world in the 1990s: every day the established titans are being challenged by new innovators. Two relative newbies have caught our attention lately. Both have woven rugs for several years and are just now emerging with good, new productions.

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One of my favorite productions from the Afghan refugee camps in Pakistan is called Khal Mohammadi. I am puzzled about where their designs spring from. They are recognizably Turkmen in character, but unlike any Turkmen designs I have seen.

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Pakistani Farahan oriental rug by Art Resources. Art Resources treats its wool with respect, never allowing it to be injured.

Art Resources creates great, old-looking oriental rugs in Pakistan, without distressing them with chemicals. Look for them to become one of the major oriental rug productions of our era.

Art Resources is one of my favorite producers. It is a Los Angeles business run by Iranian-born Jack Simantob. Equipped with an MBA from an American college and a good background in antique rugs, Mr. Simantob first imported rugs from Pakistan and then began to make them.

Jack’s vision was different from other rugmakers in one important respect. He wanted to create great, old-looking rugs, but he wanted to do it without distressing them with chemicals or other methods which compromise the quality of the wool. He ages his rugs ‘naturally’, as he says, and over a period of months. That approach is well-nigh heroic when you consider how expensive it must be to tie up scores of large rugs for months while they age. Still, the price to the end user is a bit less than most other ‘antiqued’ rugs, and I have to say that the wool pile in the Art Resources rugs feels much better than wool in rugs that have been aged overnight. I did not at first ask Mr. Simantob what his ‘natural aging’ consists of, assuming the answer is a professional secret, but at the risk of being rude, eventually I did inquire. I was right the first time: professional secret.

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Chris Walter has quietly created one of the very best and largest productions of natural-dyed oriental rugs in the world in three separate businesses.

In our last post we mentioned that some Westerners take a very active role producing rugs in the Afghan refugee camps in Pakistan. One of the earliest of these special rugmkers was an American named Chris Walter.

Chris Walter and friends in Haripur Refugee Camp.

Chris Walter is a thoughtful listener, a soft-spoken, serious man, not given to self-promotion. Now in his 40s, he seems most comfortable sitting Eastern style on a carpet with Tibetan or Turkmen friends around a meal of pilaf, lentils, naan, and slices of fruit, speaking Tibetan or Turkmen or, for the sake of Western guests, a pidgin English.

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A finely-knotted Pakistani Aryana rug from Yayla tribal rugs.

Some of the best new oriental rugs are being made in Pakistan by Afghan refugees.

The path for the rug renaissance in Pakistan was paved by Afghanistan’s tragic civil war and the subsequent flood of Afghan refugees into neighboring Pakistan. More than a million Afghans sought refuge there, and hundreds of thousands still live in refugee camps in Peshawar and elsewhere near the Afghan-Pakistan border. Great numbers live in tents pitched in the desert. They segregate themselves by tribal alliances and language groups: Baluchis, Turkmen, Hazaras, and others.

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Even though we choose each rug in our collection carefully and lovingly, some go unsold. We’ll be offering those rugs at greatly reduced prices over the next two weeks, during our March Clearance Sale.

Take a look here to see the hundreds of rugs available at a deep discount.

As always, you are free to try the rugs at home before you buy.