Visiting a handmade silk carpets factory in Samarkand, Uzbekistan
For the winter holidays, I travelled to Uzbekistan and visited Samarkand, an important city in the ancient silk road trade route to China. Samarkand is famous for many things: such as its culture, beautiful mosques, its history with Amir Timur and his successors, amazing food, and silk carpets. I booked a day tour of the city with the hotel I was staying.
My tour guide took me to one of the silk carpet factories in Samarkand, which she said was run by her friend’s mum. The manager, Zainab, was very gracious and kind to show me around the factory and answer all my questions. In this article, I will share some of the interesting things I saw at the silk carpet factory.
Extracting the threads from the silkworm and dying them
First, they showed me how the silk thread is extracted from the silkworm’s pupae. They also showed me a number of natural dyes that are used to colour the threads, such as blue from indigo. The factory had a number of plants growing on it, each corresponding to a specific colour of dye.
There were silk carpets in many different colours, many patterns and many varieties, including one with the picture of Aishwarya Rai (Bollywood actress) and another of Mona Lisa.
Zainab also showed me an interesting phenomenon: the colour of the carpets changed when viewed from a different angle. She explained this was because of the way the light fell upon the strands of silk that the carpets were made of.
Carpet weaving workshop
Next, Zainab took me to a workshop inside the factory where the skilled female workers were weaving the patterns. It was quite a painstaking process and the level of skill and accuracy needed seemed quite high to me. In that factory, no machines were used and the carpets, both silk and woolen carpets, were hand woven.
Zainab also explained that the price of the carpets depended on the amount of time and effort needed to make them. Some of them were made in a few days while others took months to make.
An exhibition of woolen carpets
Zainab then took me the the part of the factory when woolen carpets were displayed. They are produced in the same way, only the raw material is wool not silk.
The wool carpets generally cost less than silk ones, since wool was thicker and hence it took less strands of wool to make a carpet of the same size. On the other hand, for silk carpets, the heavier ones cost more because more silk is used, while for woolewn carpets, the lighter ones cost more because they are made of finer wool.
Awards and visitors
Finally, she showed me a display of awards won by the factory and dignitaries who had visited the factory in the past few decades, including the then French President Sarkozy, Chinese president Xi Jinping and Russian President Putin. It was clear this was pretty famous, which Zainab explained was because there are only a few big factories of this size that make handmade silk carpets in Samarkand.
Time to buy souveniers
Finally, the tour was over and it was time to buy some souveniers. The factory also made scarves, bags and other smaller items. I bought a handmade silk scarf for my mum, which cost USD $20. They had multiple payment systems available, including credit card. I was surprised I could pay by UPI or Unified Payments Interface of India via my mobile phone Cred app.
Zainab mentioned that they had orders from India and many other countries, and regularly exported silk and woolen carpets there. They could even weave carpets of a specific pattern.
Finally, she shared her business card. The website is samarkandsilkcarpets.com where one can view their catalog, chat with them on their whatsapp number, and give orders.
Conclusion
This concluded my tour of the Samarkand silk carpets factory. I got a really nice overview of how silk and woolen carpets are made. It is nice to see that the age old art of silk carpet making by hand is still very much alive and flourishing in Samarkand, Uzbekistan.
