Tibetan Rugs

Tibetan weaving is a village tradition that became, almost by accident, the technical foundation of the entire contemporary designer rug market.

The loop knot

Tibetan weaving does not tie knots. The weaver wraps a continuous yarn around pairs of warp threads and around a metal gauge rod laid across the loom. When a row is finished, the loops are cut along the rod, releasing the pile.

Three consequences follow, and they explain the technique's modern dominance:

• Pile height is set by the rod diameter, so it can be controlled precisely and varied deliberately within a single rug.
• It is faster than knotting at a comparable density.
• It handles abstract and irregular design well, because there is no cartoon-and-knot grid forcing the drawing into a lattice.

That last point is why almost every contemporary designer rug — the plain fields, the loose washes of colour, the cut-and-loop textures — is woven this way rather than by Persian or Turkish knotting. Density is quoted in knots per inch across the row, typically 60, 80 or 100 knots, where 100 is fine work.

The wool

Tibetan sheep graze above 4,000 metres. The fleece they grow to survive that is long- staple and high in lanolin, which makes it resilient, lustrous and notably soil-shedding. It is genuinely among the best rug wool available, for the same structural reasons set out in wool rug properties.

Traditional Tibetan yarn is also hand-spun and hand-carded, so it varies along its length and takes dye slightly unevenly — which is why good Tibetan rugs have a depth of colour that flat industrial dyeing cannot reproduce.

Traditional formats

Village Tibetan weaving is small and functional rather than decorative. The khaden is a sleeping and sitting rug, roughly 3×6 feet. Saddle rugs come in matched pairs shaped to the saddle. Meditation squares are about 3×3. Larger carpets were monastic or aristocratic and are comparatively scarce.

Design runs to dragons, snow lions, medallions and lattice fields, often with strong colour and a directness that has more in common with Caucasian weaving than with Chinese despite the geography.

Where they are made now

Very little in Tibet itself. The industry relocated with the Tibetan diaspora after 1959, principally to Kathmandu — which is why Nepalese rugs and Tibetan rugs are frequently the same object described two ways. Significant production also happens in northern India.

Buying

Judge wool first. Compress a handful of pile and release it: good Tibetan wool springs back immediately and shows lustre at a low angle. Then check density, then dye behaviour. The general sequence is in how to buy Persian rugs.

Contemporary Tibetan-weave rugs from good workshops are among the better values in new hand-knotted production — genuinely durable, made from excellent wool, and priced well below fine Persian city weaving. See rug prices.