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CANADIAN RUG TRADERS directly sources handmade oriental carpets from around the world. If you are curious where these beauties originate from then we hope you find the below interesting and informative!
Click on each country to find out more!
The history of carpet weaving goes back many hundreds of years on the Indian sub-continent. The Mughal conquerors first taught the local captives that were incarcerated to weave to occupy their time in captivity. This spread out into the local population around the great cities of Agra, Jaipur and Varanasi. Weaving is concentrated in these areas including Nepalese and Tibetan style rugs in the Varanasi area as Buddha is buried at the holy sight of Sarnath nearby. India has benefitted from inexpensive labour and the ready access to the great quality wools of Australia and New Zealand being part of the British Commonwealth.
Pakistan dominated the carpet market for many years producing high quality Bokhara rugs (elephant's foot pattern) with over 14,000,000 looms producing this quality rug. Pakistan has also attracted many Turkoman refugees from Afghanistan and the Caucasus’ with the unrest in these regions. This has led to a huge change in the carpet production in this country. Pakistan is the foremost producer of hand-spun vegetable dye rugs, Kazaks and very fine decorative carpets utilising New Zealand wool due to their commonwealth connections.
Most Afghan rugs come out through the Khyber Pass into Pakistan to be sold in the bazaars of Peshawar. We have agents who spend the year collecting suitable pieces from here to be viewed, selected and bought in Lahore as Peshawar is too dangerous to visit. We also have access to a wonderful old Haji who sends his sons out into the volatile Belouchi tribal lands to bring us back beautiful antique prayer rugs that we also sell.
Other countries
We realise their are other sources of hand-made rugs in the world and periodically we may have pieces from Turkey, Egypt, Morocco and China.