October 2009 Archives

Earlier this year I posted an entry in this blog about my visit to the old city of Kashgar, and remarked that the ancient mud-brick town was still in remarkably good shape.

It seems my optimism was premature. The local government in Kashgar has formulated a plan to replace all the existing mud-brick dwellings with modern brick structures. This will eliminate at a stroke what is possibly the only surviving, virtually complete medieval Muslim walled settlement left within China's borders.

The issues of destruction of cultural heritage and loss of history, memory and place that this raises are highlighted in an article by Jim Stent and He Shuzhong of the Beijing Cultural Heritage Protection Center, that appears in this month's edition of Orientations Magazine (October 2009), and also on the CHP's own website.

The pictures at left show a medieval doorway in Kashgar that I photographed during my trip earlier this year. Whilst this particular entry way might not seem very significant, it does contain clues to the great age of the old town. In particular the degree to which the kerbstone of the doorway lies below the current street level (it is "sunken" around 30cm) suggests that it is several centuries old. Over time the ground level of traditional towns rises slowly, as footpaths are re-made with new material. Sunken doorways are a common feature of traditional settlements across the world, and have even been used by urban archaeologists to make a rough estimate the ages of dwellings within such towns.

The other striking feature of this doorway is the carved lintel above it, with its carved vine motif. This is a classical Silk Road design, present on carved wood excavated from even earlier times than the old town at Kashgar. The lintel was probably painted at one time, but the paint is now entirely gone. The lintel might have been carved at the time the doorway was made, or it might be an even older piece that has been re-used from another structure.

Aside from the loss of a unique architectural gem, the re-building of the town is a potential economic loss to Kashgar. It is unlikely that foreign tourists will journey to Kashgar to see a Disney-fied version of the town. I urge those involved with this to re-consider before much is lost that will never be replaced.

A search on Google of "organic rug" or "organic carpet" gets plenty of hits, but are any of the products on offer actually organic? I tried the experiment this morning, and at first sight it might appear that there are lots of organic rugs on offer. Many vendors are using descriptors such as "natural" and "organic design", or calling their sites "Organic store", but despite attempts to imply that the products are organic none of the products on offer had organic certification. A few rug sites in the Middle East and Africa made outright "organic" claims but could not offer any certification information to back this up.

There is organic wool on offer for knitting and blanket-making, so why not organic carpets? A little understanding of the materials and process that goes into a handmade carpet reveals why.

The key feature of a handmade rug (or any good rug for that matter) is that the wool used is sufficiently strong and has a long enough staple length to make a durable carpet. A floor rug is an "extreme textile", meaning that it has to take far more punishment than a sweater, for example, and so correspondingly tough wool is needed. In practice this means wool from specialized carpet sheep living at altitude, which grow the long coats required for this grade of wool. High altitude pastures are very large since the grazing is sparse, and nearly all the breeds of sheep have to be tended over migratory routes, sometimes involving hundreds of kilometers of travel, usually by nomadic herders. Wool for our Torana Tibetan carpets for example comes mainly from the mountainous regions in the far west of Tibet, where the pastures are vast.

This poses a major problem for gaining organic certification. The requirements for certification can be seen on the Organic Trade Association website; there are several, but the key one is "Livestock feed and forage used from the last third of gestation must be certified organic", something that is in practical terms impossible for sheep in large open pastures without fences or clear boundaries. Since nomad-produced wool typically comes from many different nomad families it is also very difficult to certify that pesticides are not used. As far as I am aware there are no grades of carpet wool produced in traditional areas that have gained organic certification for these logistical reasons, hence no truly organic rugs.

In the case of Tibetan wool used in our own rugs we are sure that there are no pesticides or disallowed materials used on the grasslands, since it would be impossible for the nomadic herders to use chemicals over the thousands of square kilometers of upland pasture that their sheep range over, but it is unlikely that we will ever be able to prove this. Similarly, cash-poor nomad families are not in the habit of using the pesticides that lowland intensive farmers use, but we are unlikely to be able to prove this to the satisfaction of an organic certification body. Sheep herders and carpet makers in other traditional areas face similar barriers.

For the would-be buyer of carpets there are several conclusions. Firstly, good carpet wool is amongst the least toxic and most environmentally benign of all materials used in contemporary furnishings, yet seeking an "organic" certified wool rug is chasing a mirage. Secondly, in the search for a safe, non-toxic rug pay attention instead to post-processing, dyeing, carpet construction and so forth. Are good quality, non-toxic dyes used? Is it a true handmade rug (good), or a latex/synthetic rubber backed product (bad)?

Buying a pure wool rug is one of the best things you can do for the environment and for your home, the materials are non-toxic and recyclable, and produced in a low-impact way. But for the benefits to become apparent the carpet industry needs to focus on the facts rather than putting up a natural/organic smokescreen in the hopes of fooling customers, while would-be rug users need to educate themselves about what is really important.