An antique Khotan solves a room problem that almost nothing else in the antique market solves. It is a hand knotted wool pile rug from the oasis city of Khotan in the Tarim Basin, on the southern rim of the Taklamakan desert, and it comes long. Plenty of antique rugs come long. What makes a Khotan unusual is that it comes long AND wide. Across the 42 antique Khotans in our Khotan collection today the median rug measures 6.0 by 11.5 feet. Across all 4,851 antique rugs we hold, the long ones have a median width of 3.6 feet. If you have a long room, a wide hallway, a galley kitchen or the foot of a large bed, that difference is the whole story.
This guide is about buying and identifying them, and every number in it comes from our own live stock on 14 October 2026, measured the same way on both sides of every comparison. It is the thirty sixth guide in this series. It is also the run that forced us to change how we report price, because the first answer we got was wrong in a way that is worth explaining rather than quietly fixing.
Key takeaways
- A Khotan is a wide long rug, not a runner. Of our long Khotans, 85 percent are at least 5 feet wide and 56 percent at least 6 feet, with a median width of 6.2 feet. Across all our long antiques only 30 percent reach 5 feet.
- Room size is where they live. 57.1 percent land in the room size band against 29.5 percent of our antiques, and only 4.8 percent are scatter size against 20.2 percent. 15 of 42 are 6 by 12.
- The pomegranate is the signature. Only 17 of our 4,851 antiques carry the pomegranate design and 10 of them are Khotans, about 68 times the catalogue rate.
- Light and warm, not red and blue. Ivory and cream run 1.57 times the catalogue rate, earth tones 1.80 and gold 1.69, while blue runs 0.21 and red 0.29.
- Geometric, not floral. Geometric 73.8 percent against 38.8, floral 14.3 against 49.2. This is the least floral type we have measured.
- Younger on average, with a genuinely early handful. Nineteenth century 16.7 percent against 29.2, but 3 of our 42 are circa 1800 and only 35 rugs in our whole antique stock are.
- Priced at or a little under the market for its size. Headline median $9,000 against $9,800. Matched on measured area, 0.79 times in the 60 to 100 square foot range and parity above about 80 square feet.
- Do not trust a size adjective, including ours. 11 of our 42 titles carry a size word the tape measure contradicts, four of them on the width.
Where Khotan is, and why the label often says East Turkestan
Khotan, also written Hotan, is an oasis city on the southern branch of the Silk Road, watered by rivers running off the Kunlun mountains into the Taklamakan desert. Politically it sits in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of China. In the rug trade the surrounding region has long been called East Turkestan, and that older name is still the one you will meet on labels, in auction catalogues and in our own records: East Turkestan is the recorded origin on 39 of our 42 Khotans.
It is worth knowing that in our stock these are not two categories but one. Of the 42 rugs with Khotan in the title, 39 also have East Turkestan in the same title, and the count of rugs titled East Turkestan without also being titled Khotan is zero. Only 40 rugs in our entire antique holding of 4,851 carry East Turkestan as an origin, and 39 of those are Khotans. So when someone offers you an East Turkestan rug, the overwhelming likelihood is that they are offering you a Khotan.
The region’s other weaving towns are names you will read about far more often than you will see. Yarkand appears in exactly two of our 4,851 antique titles, and in both cases as a second name beside Khotan rather than on its own. Samarkand, which gave its name to a whole category of rugs in the Western trade, appears in none of our antique titles at all. Kansu, from Gansu province further east along the Silk Road, has its own small group of six. The practical reading is that Khotan is the weaving centre of the region that actually reaches the market in quantity, and the other names are mostly used as qualifiers on Khotan rugs or as attributions of convenience. If a rug is offered to you as a Samarkand, ask what distinguishes it from a Khotan, because in the trade the two words have often meant the same object.
Three of our own 42 are recorded with Chinese rather than East Turkestan origin. That is defensible rather than wrong, since Khotan is in China, but it does mean those three sit outside the origin archive that holds the other 39. It is a small illustration of a large point about antique rug records: a category boundary is a filing decision, and filing decisions made by different people on different days do not always agree. The same rug can legitimately appear as Chinese or as East Turkestan. Search both.
The format is the whole story
Almost everything useful about buying a Khotan follows from its shape. The median Khotan in our stock measures 6.0 by 11.5 feet, with a median aspect ratio of 1.89. The median across all our antiques is 1.46. So Khotans are noticeably longer relative to their width than rugs generally, which is the thing most descriptions of the type do get right.
What those descriptions miss, and what matters when you are actually buying, is the width. Take every antique rug we hold with an aspect ratio of 1.8 or more, which is 1,168 rugs, and look at how wide they are:
| Long antique rugs, ratio 1.8 or more | How many | 5 ft or wider | 6 ft or wider | Median width |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Our Khotans | 27 | 85.2% | 55.6% | 6.2 ft |
| Our Serabs | 25 | 12.0% | 4.0% | 3.5 ft |
| All our antiques | 1,168 | 29.9% | 21.9% | 3.6 ft |
A Khotan’s long rugs are nearly twice the width of the catalogue’s long rugs, and almost twice the width of an antique Serab, which is the type in our stock that genuinely does specialise in narrow runners at 72 percent. These are not competing answers to one question. They are answers to two different questions. A runner 3 feet 6 inches wide runs down a corridor or beside a bed. A gallery rug 6 feet 6 inches wide furnishes a long room, and it is the format that defeats most antique shopping, because the market is full of 9 by 12 rugs for square rooms and full of runners for corridors, and comparatively empty in between.
Our own structured size fields say the same thing from another direction. Thirty eight percent of our Khotans carry wide gallery as their general size against 4.8 percent of our antiques, which is 7.93 times the rate. In the standard size buckets, 15 of 42 are 6 by 12, a bucket that holds only 2 percent of our antiques, and four more are 7 by 13 against 1 percent. Measured properly, 57.1 percent sit in the room size band against 29.5 percent of our antiques, and the small scatter sizes that make up a fifth of our antique stock account for only two Khotans out of 42.
The buying consequence is simple. If you have measured your room and concluded you need an 8 by 10 or a 9 by 12, and the room is actually long rather than square, stop and measure again. A 6 by 12 or a 7 by 13 may fit the furniture better than either, and in Khotan it is the common size rather than the special order.
What they cost, and why our first answer was wrong
Across the 42 antique Khotans in stock on 14 October 2026 the median asking price is $9,000, with a quarter below $5,838 and a quarter above $13,600, in a range from $1,350 to $60,000. There are 32 distinct prices among the 42, so this is a real distribution rather than a few numbers repeated. Against a median of $9,800 for every antique we hold, that is 0.92 times the market, which reads as essentially level.
Then we compared band for band, the way every guide in this series has since October, and the room size band came out at 0.70 times: $9,500 against $13,600 for every antique in that band. A 30 percent saving in the type’s own core format would be a genuine finding, and we were ready to publish it.
It is not true. A size band is wide. The room band spans roughly 6 to 15 feet on the long side, so two rugs inside it can differ by half in area. Our room size Khotans average 76 square feet. The catalogue’s room size rugs average 105. Priced per square foot, that same band comes out at 1.08 times, slightly above the market rather than 30 percent below it. The entire apparent discount was a smaller rug costing less money, which is not a discount at all.
So here is the honest version, matched on measured area, with the count stated for every row and nothing published where the count is too small to mean anything:
| Matched on measured area | Khotans | Khotan median | All antiques that size | Ratio |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 20 to 45 sq ft | 12 | $3,400 | $6,000 | 0.57x |
| 40 to 80 sq ft | 20 | $8,900 | $9,800 | 0.91x |
| 60 to 100 sq ft | 21 | $9,500 | $12,000 | 0.79x |
| 80 to 130 sq ft | 9 | $13,000 | $13,300 | 0.98x |
| 100 to 160 sq ft | 6 | $15,750 | $14,100 | 1.12x |
Read down that column and the pattern is clear enough to act on. In the small and middle sizes a Khotan is cheaper than the equivalent antique, by a wide margin at the bottom end and by roughly a fifth through the 60 to 100 square foot range where most of them sit. By about 80 square feet the advantage is gone, and in the largest sizes we hold it reverses. If you want value, the Khotan sweet spot is a rug under roughly 8 by 10 in area, which given the shape means something like a 5 by 10 or a 6 by 12.
Three numbers we are deliberately not quoting. The room band at 0.70 times and the area band at 0.51 times both inherit the size problem described above. The whole group price per square foot of 0.77 times inherits it too, because Khotans skew large and price per square foot falls as rugs get bigger across the whole catalogue. And the scatter, runner and oversized bands rest on two, one and four rugs respectively, which is not a market.
We are also not publishing a mean. One rug, a $60,000 piece whose title stacks two town names, is nearly five times the next highest price. The median is $9,000 with it and $9,000 without it, but the mean moves from $11,933 to $10,761, and a figure that moves that much on one rug is not describing the group.
Across the types we have now measured this way, an antique Bidjar runs at roughly twice the catalogue median on the headline, an antique Bakhtiari at 1.6 times, an antique Bessarabian at 1.46, a Serab right on it, a Khotan a touch under, an antique Afshar at 0.46 and an antique Baluch at 0.28. Those last two are the warning. Afshar’s apparent 54 percent discount vanishes once you match on size, and Baluch, measured per square foot, is actually slightly dearer than our catalogue average. Both of them look cheap because they are small, and a small rug costing less money is not a bargain. Always ask what size the comparison is being made at.
The pomegranate, and how to read the drawing
If one motif identifies this group, it is the pomegranate. It appears as a repeating fruit, often borne on a vine or growing out of a vase or a cluster of roots, marching in rows up the field. Of our 4,851 antique rugs, only 17 carry the pomegranate design, and 10 of those 17 are Khotans. Four more are Chinese, so 14 of the 17 come from the Khotan and China corridor. Khotan is under 1 percent of our antique stock, which puts the motif at roughly 68 times its catalogue rate on a Khotan. That is the strongest single design association we have measured on any type in this series.
Beyond the pomegranate, the drawing is best described by what it is not. Our Khotans are geometric at 73.8 percent against 38.8 percent of our antiques, and floral at only 14.3 percent against 49.2 percent. That 0.29 ratio makes this the least floral type we have measured, which is worth holding on to, because the standard description of a Khotan in the trade reaches for words like stylised floral arrangements. They are also allover compositions more often than not at 64.3 percent, meaning the field carries a repeat rather than one dominant central medallion. Medallions are not absent, at 35.7 percent against 29.3, but a Khotan is not primarily a medallion rug and only two of our 42 titles describe one as such.
The border vocabulary runs to lattices, frets and key patterns rather than the flowing floral vines of Persian city weaving. Three of our 42 carry the Greek key and running dog design and two carry trellis and lattice, though in fairness neither is over represented against our antiques generally, so treat border type as supporting evidence rather than proof. Eleven of our 42 titles use the word tribal, which is our vocabulary for the drawing rather than a claim about how or where the rug was woven. Khotan weaving was town and oasis workshop work. If a seller tells you your Khotan was woven in a tent, ask how they know.
Colour: light, warm, and almost never blue
This is where received wisdom about Khotans diverges most sharply from what our own stock looks like, and it is the most useful thing in this guide if you are trying to recognise one across a showroom.
| Colour recorded | Our Khotans | All our antiques | Ratio |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ivory, beige, cream, white | 45.2% | 28.9% | 1.57x |
| Brown and earth tone | 11.9% | 6.6% | 1.80x |
| Gold, yellow, orange | 9.5% | 5.6% | 1.69x |
| Coral, salmon, pink | 14.3% | 9.3% | 1.53x |
| Blue | 4.8% | 23.2% | 0.21x |
| Red and rust | 2.4% | 8.3% | 0.29x |
A Khotan is a light rug. Ivory, cream and beige grounds are the commonest thing we see, earth tones and golds are well over represented, and coral turns up often enough to count as characteristic. Blue and red, the two colours that dominate Persian weaving and that most general descriptions of Khotan reach for first, are the two most under represented colours in the group: blue at a fifth of its normal rate and red at under a third. Our own listing titles agree, with light, neutral, faded, soft and earth all appearing at between three and twelve times their catalogue rate, and blue at a quarter.
Two practical notes follow. First, a faded or washed appearance is normal and often desirable here rather than a defect, but you should still establish whether softness of colour came from age and light or from a chemical wash, which is a different conversation and one our guide to natural and synthetic dyes goes into. Second, if you are buying for a room with a lot of light wood and off white walls, this type will sit in it more easily than almost any other antique category. If you need a deep blue anchor for a dark room, a Khotan is probably the wrong place to look and our Kurdish or Bidjar collections are better hunting. We do hold exceptions. A sky blue ground room size nineteenth century piece at $37,500 exists precisely because it is unusual, and its own listing calls it rare.
Age: later than you would guess, with a real early handful
People assume a Khotan is old, and on average ours are younger than our antiques generally. Nineteenth century pieces are 16.7 percent of our Khotans against 29.2 percent across our antique stock. The commonest recorded dates are around 1920 and 1930, and the 1930 bucket runs at 2.21 times its catalogue rate. That makes sense against the history: Khotan weaving for export expanded substantially in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, so most surviving pieces in commerce are from that later wave.
At the same time this group holds a genuinely early cluster out of proportion to its size. Three of our 42 are recorded circa 1800, a date carried by only 35 rugs in our entire antique stock of 4,851, so a Khotan is roughly ten times likelier than average to be one of them. One of those is a persimmon and light blue carpet at $22,500. Another early piece, a small yellow ground rug its own listing dates to the early nineteenth century, is $11,450 at 4.8 by 7.0 feet, which is to say it costs more than most of our Khotans three times its size. That is what age does to price in this type.
Because the age distribution has two humps rather than one, do not accept a group generalisation about a particular rug in either direction. Ask what the date rests on. Our antique, vintage and new explainer sets out what those words should mean, and for a rug in this price range the date deserves specific evidence rather than a category habit.
What our own records get wrong, and what that teaches you
We measure every rug we list, and we also write a title for it. On this type the two disagree often enough to be a lesson, and the disagreement falls on exactly the axis this guide says matters most. Eleven of our 42 Khotan titles carry a size adjective that the tape measure contradicts.
Four rugs described as long and narrow are 6.8, 8.5, 8.7 and 9.2 feet WIDE. A rug 9 feet 2 inches across is not narrow by any standard, yet this one is titled long and narrow size at 9.2 by 18.2 feet. Meanwhile three rugs described as wide measure 4.0, 5.5 and 5.5 feet across, all of them below this group’s own median width of 6.2 feet, including a wide gallery size rug that is 4 feet wide. Set those two side by side and you have a 4 foot rug called wide and a 9 foot rug called narrow, in the same catalogue, on the same field. Three more rugs are called small or scatter size with long sides of 7.0, 7.1 and 7.6 feet, and one called long and narrow has an aspect ratio of 1.75, which is below the group median of 1.89 and nowhere near a runner.
We are not pointing this out to be self flagellating. We are pointing it out because it generalises, and because the generalisation protects you. Size adjectives in rug listings are written by people, at speed, by comparison with whatever that person saw last. They are not measurements. The same is true of shape words: in a previous guide in this series we found three rugs of ours described as square, in the title, the shape field and the body text, where two of the three were not square when measured. Three fields can agree with each other and all be wrong, because they were copied from each other rather than from the rug.
So when you shop, in our listings or anyone else’s, do this. Get the width and the length in inches, not a label. Work out the ratio yourself. Compare it to the space you actually have, measured, including where the doors swing and where the furniture legs land. On a type like this, where the whole buying case is a shape that other types do not supply, a wrong adjective can cost you a rug that would have fitted or land you one that will not.
What we can and cannot tell you about construction
All 42 of our antique Khotans are hand knotted pile, against 78.2 percent of our antique stock, and all 42 record wool as their material. Both facts are solid and both are worth having. Beyond them, we want to be careful.
The material field on a rug listing, ours included, describes the pile you can see. It is not a statement about the foundation. You will frequently read that Khotans are wool pile on a cotton foundation, and that is the usual account of the type, but we do not record warps and wefts and so we are not going to assert it about any rug we hold. If the foundation matters to you, and our guide to warps and wefts explains when it should, examine the rug or ask for a photograph of the back and the ends. That is a question answered by looking, not by reading a field.
We also do not record knot density for these rugs, so no knots per square inch figure appears anywhere in this guide. Khotan is a coarser weave than Persian city work by reputation, and our guide to knots and KPSI explains why a lower count is a description rather than a criticism, but reputation is not measurement and we are not going to convert one into the other. Every one of our 42 carries the same recorded pile thickness, which tells you the field was filled in consistently and tells you nothing about any individual rug.
How to check a Khotan before you buy
- Measure, then compare the ratio. Width and length in inches. A ratio near 1.9 with a width of 5 to 7 feet is the classic Khotan shape. A ratio over 3 with a width under 4 feet is a runner, and probably a different type.
- Look for the repeat, not the medallion. A field of pomegranates, lattice or geometric repeat points to Khotan. A single large floral medallion on a red ground points elsewhere.
- Check the palette against the type. Ivory, cream, earth, gold and coral are normal. A deep blue or strong red ground is unusual and should prompt a question rather than an assumption.
- Ask what the date rests on. This group runs 1900 to 1935 far more often than it runs nineteenth century, so an early attribution needs specific evidence.
- Ignore the size adjective and read the numbers. On our own stock, 11 of 42 titles get a size word wrong, four of them on the width.
- Treat stacked town names as a flag. Khotan Yarkand or Khotan Samarkand in one title usually means the attribution is not settled. That is not a reason to walk away, but it is a reason to price it as uncertain.
- Beware of the word style. A rug described as Khotan style is being described as resembling one, which is a different claim from being one.
- Compare per square foot, at the same size. Not band to band, and never a small rug of one type against a large rug of another.
Khotan next to the alternatives
If the shape is what draws you, the honest comparison is against the other long formats. An antique Serab is long and narrow in earnest: 72 percent runners, a median width of 3.5 feet and a median ratio of 3.34. If your space is a corridor, buy the Serab. If it is a room that happens to be long, the Serab will look like a strip laid down the middle of it and the Khotan will furnish it.
If the geography is what draws you, the near neighbours are the Chinese weaves. Our antique Chinese rugs guide covers the tradition broadly, and Ningxia and Peking are the two groups most often confused with Khotan on a label. The separation is easier than it sounds: Chinese court and commercial weaving leans floral, open ground and medallion centred with cloud band and dragon vocabulary, where Khotan leans geometric, filled and repeating. For the deco end of that story, Walter Nichols is a separate conversation again and a twentieth century one.
And if the warm light palette is the appeal rather than the shape or the place, then look sideways at antique Bessarabian flatweaves, which answer the area rug question in European terms, or across our ivory and cream collection generally. A Khotan is the answer when you want all three at once: the light palette, the geometric drawing and the long wide shape. Not much else supplies that combination.
For the longer history of the weaving, the Silk Road context, the archaeology and the symbolism of the motifs, our Khotan reference page goes into far more depth than this guide does, as does our survey of rugs of Central Asia and of rugs of China. This guide is deliberately about the purchase.
What is in our collection right now
These are our actual asking prices on 14 October 2026, on rugs that are in stock as this is written. They are one of a kind pieces, so by the time you read this some will have sold. The full set is in our Khotan collection and the wider antique rug collection around it.
- The entry point. A scenic allover piece at $1,350 and a brown earth tone rug at $1,750 are the two least expensive Khotans we hold. Only three of our 42 are under $3,000, so this type does not really come cheap.
- Pomegranate, affordably. A coral pomegranate rug dated to the 1920s at $3,200, at 5.2 by 8.2 feet.
- Small, for the shape. A scatter size wool pile piece at $3,800, 4.7 by 7.6 feet.
- The classic gallery format. A wide hallway gallery rug at $5,850 at 5.5 by 11.2 feet, and a light colour allover geometric at $7,200 at 6.3 by 12.0 feet. This is the middle of the type.
- Pomegranate at size. An allover geometric pomegranate at $8,650, 6.2 by 12.2 feet, and another at $9,000, 5.5 by 10.5 feet. Both sit on the group median.
- Room size. A yellow ground room size rug at $9,800 at 7.8 by 13.8 feet, and a tribal geometric at $13,000, 6.9 by 13.3 feet.
- Large. A neutral tribal piece at $13,600 at 6.8 by 13.2 feet, and the 9.2 by 18.2 foot rug at $21,000 mentioned above for being described as narrow.
- Early and rare. A circa 1800 persimmon and light blue carpet at $22,500, and a sky blue ground nineteenth century room size piece at $37,500.
If you are working to a size rather than a budget, tell us the room dimensions and where the doors and furniture are, and we will tell you which of these actually fits. On this type that is the conversation that matters, because the shape is the reason to buy one.
Frequently asked questions
What is an antique Khotan rug?
A Khotan is a hand knotted wool pile rug from the oasis city of Khotan in the Tarim Basin, in what is now the Xinjiang region of western China and what the rug trade has long called East Turkestan. All 42 antique Khotans in our stock on 14 October 2026 are hand knotted pile and all 42 are wool faced. The defining feature for a buyer is format rather than fibre: a Khotan is usually long and, unusually for a long rug, it is usually wide. Our 42 have a median long side of 11.5 feet and a median short side of 6.0 feet, and 15 of them fall in the 6 by 12 size bucket, which only 2 percent of our antiques do.
How much does an antique Khotan rug cost?
Across the 42 antique Khotans in our stock on 14 October 2026 the median asking price is $9,000, with a quarter under $5,838 and a quarter over $13,600, against a median of $9,800 for all 4,851 antique rugs we hold. There are 32 distinct prices among the 42, so that is a real distribution. Matched against other antiques of the same measured area, a Khotan runs about 0.79 times the market in the 60 to 100 square foot range (n=21) and about 0.91 times in the 40 to 80 square foot range (n=20), with the gap closing to parity around 80 square feet and disappearing above it. The saving, where it exists, is in the small and middle sizes.
Are Khotan rugs the same as East Turkestan rugs?
In our stock they are very nearly the same rugs. Of the 42 rugs titled Khotan, 39 also carry the words East Turkestan in the same title, and the number of rugs titled East Turkestan that are not also titled Khotan is zero. East Turkestan is the region and Khotan is the city within it that did most of the weaving we see. Only 40 of our 4,851 antiques carry East Turkestan as their recorded origin, and 39 of those are Khotans. Yarkand appears in exactly two of our titles and in both cases as a second name alongside Khotan, and Samarkand and Kashgar appear in none.
Why are so many Khotan rugs long and narrow?
They are long, but calling them narrow is the mistake. Taking every antique we hold with an aspect ratio of 1.8 or more, 85 percent of the Khotans are at least 5 feet wide and 56 percent are at least 6 feet wide, with a median width of 6.2 feet. Across all our long antiques only 30 percent reach 5 feet wide, and the median is 3.6 feet. A Khotan is a wide gallery rug, not a runner: our median aspect ratio is 1.89 against 3.34 for an antique Serab, the type that really does specialise in narrow runners. This matters because the two formats solve different problems.
What is the pomegranate design on a Khotan rug?
It is a repeating motif of pomegranates, often growing from a vase or a cluster of roots and filling the field in rows, and it is the closest thing to a signature this weaving group has. Only 17 of our 4,851 antique rugs carry the pomegranate design, and 10 of those 17 are Khotans. Four more are Chinese, so 14 of the 17 sit on the Khotan and China axis. Khotan is under 1 percent of our antique stock, which makes the motif roughly 68 times more common on a Khotan than across our antiques generally. If you are shown a pomegranate field rug in warm neutrals, Khotan is the first attribution to test.
Are antique Khotan rugs blue?
Usually not, and this is where received descriptions of the type go wrong most often. Blue appears on 4.8 percent of our Khotans against 23.2 percent of our antiques, a fifth of the normal rate, and red or rust appears on 2.4 percent against 8.3 percent. What a Khotan actually tends to be is light and warm: ivory, beige and cream run at 1.57 times the catalogue rate, brown and earth tones at 1.80, golds and yellows at 1.69 and coral at 1.53. Our own listing titles say the same thing, with light, neutral, faded and earth all appearing at several times their usual rate.
Are Khotan rugs older than other antique rugs?
On average they are younger, which surprises people. Nineteenth century pieces are 16.7 percent of our Khotans against 29.2 percent of our antiques, and the commonest recorded dates are around 1920 and 1930, with the 1930 bucket running at 2.21 times the catalogue rate. There is a real early handful though: 3 of our 42 are recorded circa 1800, and only 35 rugs in our whole antique stock of 4,851 carry that date, so a Khotan is about 10 times likelier than average to be one of them. Age in this type is bimodal, so ask for the evidence on any individual rug rather than assuming the group is old or late.
How can I tell a Khotan from a Chinese rug?
Read the drawing and the palette before the label, because the two traditions overlap geographically and Khotan is politically in China. A Khotan is strongly geometric (73.8 percent of ours, against 38.8 percent of our antiques) and barely floral (14.3 percent against 49.2 percent), it usually fills the field with a repeat rather than centring one large medallion, and the border vocabulary tends toward lattices, Greek key and fret rather than the cloud bands and dragons of Chinese court weaving. Format is the other tell: a long rug 6 or 7 feet wide is a Khotan shape. Note that three of our own 42 are recorded with Chinese origin rather than East Turkestan, which is defensible rather than wrong, so a record saying Chinese does not rule a Khotan out.