China: palace carpets, export factories and Cuihuangkou

The Palace Museum in Beijing holds nearly 1,000 Ming and Qing carpets. More than 300 of them, Xinhua reported in 2024, came from Ningxia, and most of those from Zhongwei; Ningxia’s hand-made carpet weaving was listed as national intangible heritage in 2021.¹1“Ningxia carpets are about 300 of the Palace Museum’s nearly 1,000 imperial carpets (corrected from ‘over half’)”, 2024 (Xinhua report), research note. Record (An earlier note in this research put the Ningxia share at over half, apparently a misreading of the Chinese for “most”, which referred to Zhongwei’s share.²2“Ningxia carpets are about 300 of the Palace Museum’s nearly 1,000 imperial carpets (corrected from ‘over half’)”, 2024 (Xinhua report), research note. Record) The earliest dated trace of tufted carpet found so far in mainland China is from the 1980s.³3“Machine-made carpet in large-scale production in China from the 1970s”, 1970s, research note. Record “China’s national standard for tufted carpet: GB/T 11746-1989”, 1989, research note, GB/T 11746-1989. Record This chapter is about the distance between those two facts, and about how it was crossed.

Palace carpets and a disputed origin

China’s state register of intangible heritage says that carpet weaving came into China from the Western Regions in the Western Han and was largely mature in the Central Plains by the Tang. Its entry for Beijing palace carpet weaving records a gold medal at the Paris Exposition of 1900, 354 workshops in Beijing in 1920, and the founding in 1956 of the joint state-private Beijing No. 1 Carpet Factory. It also warns, in translation: “no successors; the technique faces the danger of being lost”.⁴4“Beijing palace carpet weaving: state-listed heritage ‘in danger of being lost’”, research note. Record

Popular histories begin the Beijing trade with a lama who brought carpets to the capital for the Xianfeng emperor and set up production at Baoguo Temple near Guang’anmen, founding the “Eastern Gate” and “Western Gate” methods.⁵5“The Beijing carpet trade begins in 1860 with a Tibetan lama, not Persia”, 1860, research note. Record The story is disputed. A publication of the Beijing Municipal Cultural Heritage Bureau dates it to 1860 or 1871; another version moves it to the Qianlong reign, with three schools and teachers from Gansu; and the Beijing Carpet Research Institute, in its research of the 1960s and 1970s, found records only of tribute carpets and no documentary basis for the lama.⁶6“The Beijing carpet trade begins in 1860 with a Tibetan lama, not Persia”, 1860, research note. Record

The export trade: Beijing and Tianjin

In the 1920s Beijing’s carpet trade boomed on exports. The research brief describes the boom as run by American merchants; the popular history it rests on names one, an American called Fette, who with the merchant Li Lixuan (李黎轩, also 李梦书) founded the Yanjing Carpet Factory (燕京地毯厂). By about 1924 it had six workshops, more than 1,200 workers and a quarter to a third of Beijing’s output.⁷7“Beijing’s 1920s export boom was run by American merchants”, 1912–1926, research note. Record A survey of 207 Beijing carpet shops in 1924 found 6,834 workers, 74 per cent of them apprentices, with 94 per cent working 12 to 14 hours a day and 93 per cent working seven days a week.⁸8“Beijing’s 1920s export boom was run by American merchants”, 1912–1926, research note. Record

Tianjin carried the larger share. According to the Tianjin Daily, between 1912 and 1927 it shipped more than 80 per cent of China’s carpet exports, 94.1 per cent in 1916 and 97.4 per cent in 1926. A Nankai Institute of Economics survey of 1929 (some sources say 1930) counted 303 carpet factories and workshops, 2,749 looms and 11,568 workers.⁹9“Tianjin carried most of China’s carpet exports (over 80% in 1912–27), then declined after the 1990s”, 1912–1990s, research note. Record From Nankai’s Committee on Social and Economic Research came H. D. Fong’s (方显廷) Tientsin Carpet Industry (《天津地毯工业》), dated 1929 or 1930, the first of his six-volume series of industry studies; it is reprinted in 《方显廷文存》 (2019).¹⁰10“《天津地毯工業》 Republican-era Chinese primary source (scan)”. Record

Tianjin’s own media are now recovering the trade’s origins. A Sohu documentary series, 「文献里的天津」, gives an episode to Wm. Pustau & Co. (鲁麟洋行), founded at Canton in 1845 by the Hamburg merchant Pustau, which opened a Tianjin branch in 1890. It was an order house, not a maker, and its title of “earliest exporter of Chinese carpets” rests on a story about one of its managers seeing carpets at the Yonghegong.¹¹11“「文献里的天津」之天津地毯故事 (Sohu archival documentary series)”. Record

The research brief claimed that the collectors’ categories “Nichols rugs” and “Chinese Art Deco” do not exist in Chinese. That is wrong.¹²12“‘Chinese Art Deco’ and ‘Nichols rugs’ do not exist in Chinese”, research note. Record Tianjin histories name Nichols as 倪克, a carpet factory said to have been founded by an American in 1923, and pair it with Fette as the two largest American carpet houses; a post on Sina describes “Chinese Art Deco-style carpets” by name. Mainstream Chinese histories, though, sort the period’s designs by their own types (美术式, 彩花式, 北京式, 素凸式) rather than by “Art Deco”.¹³13“‘Chinese Art Deco’ and ‘Nichols rugs’ do not exist in Chinese”, research note. Record

Tianjin’s later century was mixed. Its “Sailing Ship” (风船) brand won gold medals at Leipzig in 1965 and 1986. From the 1990s, according to the Tianjin Daily, the city’s carpets lost their advantage in export conditions and in competition at home, and the old plants, led by the No. 2 and No. 3 carpet factories, were gradually displaced by urban construction.¹⁴14“Tianjin carried most of China’s carpet exports (over 80% in 1912–27), then declined after the 1990s”, 1912–1990s, research note. Record

Tufting arrives from abroad

When tufting reached mainland China is not firmly documented. A promotional post by a seller of printers says that machine-made carpet began large-scale production in China in the 1970s, which carries little weight.¹⁵15“Machine-made carpet in large-scale production in China from the 1970s”, 1970s, research note. Record A 2013 trade article, seen once in a search summary and not found again, is more careful: China began its own research on machine-made carpet in the 1970s and imported its first tufting machine in 1980.¹⁶16“Machine-made carpet in large-scale production in China from the 1970s”, 1970s, research note. Record

The clearest evidence of where the machines came from concerns a factory of the petrochemical industry. A 2004 taxpayer profile in China Taxation describes the Beijing Yanshan Petrochemical Company Carpet Factory, predecessor of the Shuangquan Yanshan Carpet Company, as “China’s earliest machine-woven carpet enterprise … the cradle of China’s modernised carpet industry” (in translation), words that are the company’s own. Its main equipment, the profile says, was imported: tufting lines from CMC and Tuftco in the United States and Cobble in Britain, Wilton looms from Belgium and Germany, and a line for bulked continuous filament yarn from Italy (on that yarn, see chapter 6). Chinese Wikipedia dates the factory’s name, 燕化公司化纤地毯厂, to 1 November 1987.¹⁷17“China’s carpet modernisation was led by an oil refinery”, research note. Record

The hardest date is a standard. China’s national standard for tufted carpet, GB 11746-89 (簇绒地毯), was issued on 20 October 1989 and came into force on 1 July 1990. Its main drafter was the Tianjin Carpet Research Institute, so the old export city’s carpet institute wrote the rules for the new product. It was replaced by GB/T 11746-2008, in force from March 2009.¹⁸18“China’s national standard for tufted carpet: GB/T 11746-1989”, 1989, research note, GB/T 11746-1989. Record The Yanshan firm says it helped draft the national standards for woven and tufted carpet.¹⁹19“China’s carpet modernisation was led by an oil refinery”, research note. Record

Making the machines came later still, on the evidence found so far. In 2004 the Huayuan Group Carpet Company commissioned the DHT-200 tufting machine from the School of Mechanical Engineering at Donghua University, which said it “filled a gap in China’s carpet-equipment industry” (in translation).²⁰20“China built its first domestic tufting machine in 2004 (DHT-200)”, 2004, research note. Record The sources disagree on the client: Baidu Baike places the company in Shanghai, a 2007 Donghua item names Jiangxi Huayuan Group.²¹21“China built its first domestic tufting machine in 2004 (DHT-200)”, 2004, research note. Record In 2010 the Donghua team under Sun Yize (孙以泽) won a second-class National Science and Technology Progress Award for a series of tufted-carpet looms and their industrialisation.²²22“Donghua team wins 2010 National Science and Technology Progress Award for digital tufting looms”, 2010, research note. Record Programmed and robotic tufting in China is taken up in chapter 12.

Imports did not stop. Chinese customs records for March 2025 include one tufted-carpet loom imported into Jiangsu at US$665,441 and one into Zhejiang at US$471,660; in February Jiangsu had imported 40 units under the same code for US$736,158 in all, so many imports under the code are of low value.²³23“China still imports high-end tufting machines”, March 2025, research note, HS 84479011. Record Foreign makers also patent in China, as Card-Monroe did with a tufting-machine application of 2017, though Chinese tufting-machine patents exist too.²⁴24The significant tufting-machine patents filed in China are foreign, 1992–2017. Record A Chinese utility model filed in April 2004 covers an electric hand-held tufting gun, then called an “electric weaving needle”; the gun’s history in China and Hong Kong is told in chapter 9.²⁵25“A hand-held horizontal electric weaving needle for weaving carpets” (CN2723478Y), filed 19 Apr 2004 (application 200420044858.X); granted/published 7 Sep 2005. Record By July 1992 Hong Kong’s Tai Ping Carpets had moved all its carpet production to Nanhai, in Guangdong.²⁶26“July 1992: Tai Ping moves all carpet production to Nanhai, Guangdong”, 1992, research note. Record

Words for a new carpet

Chinese has its own words for the new technique: 簇绒 for tufting in general, 簇绒机 for the industrial machine, 簇绒枪 for the gun, and 枪刺, “gun-stab”, a trade word for hand-tufting.²⁷27“Chinese tufting vocabulary”, research note. Record The national standard calls the product 手工枪刺胶背地毯, “hand gun-tufted glue-backed carpet” (GB/T 27729-2011). Sellers drop the “glue-backed” and sell 手工枪刺地毯, so buyers hear 手工, “handmade”. One source calls such carpets “mistakenly called handmade”, though Baidu Baike counts them as handmade carpet; the main sources are sellers of hand-knotted carpet, with an interest in the distinction. The research brief sees the same slippage in “hand-tufted” in English.²⁸28“‘Hand-tufted’ sells as ‘handmade’ in Chinese too”, research note. Record

Cuihuangkou and the export lead

China is now the world’s largest carpet exporter, with 23.5 per cent of world exports in 2023, according to ITC figures reported by the trade site Ebrun; its carpet exports that year were worth US$4.0 billion, according to the CHTA.²⁹29“China is the world’s #1 carpet exporter; Tianjin-made carpet’s biggest market is Iraq”, 2023–2024, research note. Record For carpets made in Tianjin, in the first ten months of what was probably 2024, the largest market was Iraq, with 19.6 per cent, ahead of the United States at 17.1 per cent and Malaysia at 11.2 per cent.³⁰30“China is the world’s #1 carpet exporter; Tianjin-made carpet’s biggest market is Iraq”, 2023–2024, research note. Record

Much of that carpet comes from Cuihuangkou (崔黄口镇), a Tianjin township of under 100 square kilometres and about 50,000 people. Official and Xinhua figures give it more than 1,200 carpet firms, more than 100 million carpets a year, and about 40 per cent of China’s carpet exports. Chinese state media group it with Dalton and Gaziantep as one of the world’s three great carpet clusters, but as an epithet; no official designation has been found. A 2020 business feature said that “eight of every ten carpets in China come from Cuihuangkou” (in translation), and in the same piece that the town made half the country’s carpets; neither figure has a statistical source.³¹31“Cuihuangkou, Tianjin: the Dalton of China that almost no American has heard of”, research note. Record

One maker there describes what a newer process has done to output. Bai Hongwei of Kaili Carpet, speaking in about August 2024 after his firm moved to heat-transfer printing, said in translation: “Now we produce 500,000–600,000 m² a month; before, that took ten years.”³²32“What killed Chinese hand-weaving was heat-transfer printing, not tufting”, research note. Record

This chapter argues that China took up tufting late and through imported machines, from the 1980s at the earliest on present evidence, and that the old carpet city still shaped the new industry: Tianjin, which had carried the carpet export trade of the 1910s and 1920s, drafted the national standard for tufted carpet and is now home to the township that ships about two-fifths of the country’s carpet exports.