A silk carpet

The Silk Road settlement towns of Khotan, Yarkand and Kashgar in the Xinjiang area of East Turkestan, were important trading posts and centres of textile manufacture for hundreds of years, carpet fragments having been discovered there that date back to the 3^rd century A.D.  Given their geography, with China to the west, Persia to the east and India to the south, the influences of these countries, from passing trade to artistic ideas, resulted in an area whose own artistic output reflected these culturally diverse antecedents.

In the 17^th century, Kashgar began producing silk carpets strongly influenced by contemporary Indian carpets; this western-most town was at the epicentre of these diverse influences due to its key position on the Silk Route; also the Kashgar Muslim Lords were related to the Mughals. The finely executed designs of these early silk carpets translated the ogival schemes and colour ranges of the Mughal designs, but the stylised arrangement of flowers and systems of intricate stem-work have an equally subtle regional variation, see Franses, Michael, First under Heaven, Hali Publications London, 1997, Chapter 6, fig.14, p.96 for an example from the Thyssen–Bornemisza Collection, Lugano, or fig.15, p.97 idem, a Dais cover formerly in the Hagop Kevorkian Collection; Private Collection, Switzerland. These early examples set the tone for the development of later Xinjiang carpets with floral patterns, including those with Herat compositions and the so-called five flower pattern, of which the present lot is an example, see Bidder, Hans, Carpets from Eastern Turkestan,  Maryland, 1979, Plate XVII, 1,  a Khotan carpet with wool pile in the Museum für Islamische Kunst, Berlin and Bidder, idem., Plate XVIII for a silk example.

These early five-flower silk carpets are rare: Michael Franses, First under Heaven, idem., ref.76, p.190, states that he knows of five examples of silk pile Dais Covers of this type, which he ascribes to Khotan or Yarkhand on the basis of colour and structure, the present lot being one of them; the other published example cited by Franses is the  Khotan silk carpet, Sotheby’s London, 19^th October, 1994, lot 163. For other related examples, see, a Khotan carpet with a central medallion, Sotheby’s New York, 1993, 15^th April, 1993, lot 50; a Kashgar carpet with a white ground,  Spuhler, F.,  The Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection, Carpets and Textiles, London, 1998, no.52, p.202. The three flower border is also a feature of these early East Turkestan silk carpets;  see Bidder, op.cit. Plate XVI., p.77, a Khotan carpet, and Franses, op cit., fig.27, p.105, a Yarkhand Dais cover, formerly in the Hagop Kevorkian Collection, New York.