History of the Hamburg rug trade

In the 19th century, Hamburg was one of the three great port cities of Europe, alongside London and Rotterdam. What came up the Elbe was first tea from China and India, tobacco from the Caribbean, coffee from Brazil, spices from Ceylon. Rugs only appear regularly in the freight lists from the 1860s onwards, and then as supplementary cargo.

The key point: a ship arriving from Smyrna or Constantinople with tobacco and figs had room to spare. Rugs filled that space. They were light, could be rolled and stacked, and in Hamburg buyers stood ready who were willing to pay more and more for oriental pieces.

The industrial bourgeoisie discovered the oriental rug as a status symbol in the 1860s and 1870s. A Smyrna rug in the parlour, a Heriz in the dining room, a Bidjar in the study. The Hamburg trading houses, which already imported tea and tobacco, added this new and lucrative commodity to their range.

The Hamburg rug merchants of the founding era were rarely lone operators. They were often trading companies with branches in Smyrna, Tiflis, Tabriz, and Constantinople. They bought on the ground, had the goods shipped to Hamburg, and sold to furniture stores and private clients across Central Europe.

Names such as Engelhard, Behrens, and later Rosenthal can be reconstructed from the Hamburg address books around 1900. Most of these houses had their own buyers in Persia, who travelled the provinces by mule for weeks at a time, inspecting rugs in village workshops and small manufactories. The good pieces went straight to Hamburg, the weaker ones were resold in Smyrna or Constantinople.

This model held until the 1970s, with breaks caused by two world wars and the Iranian Revolution of 1979.

The Speicherstadt was almost half destroyed in the Second World War. What remained was rebuilt in the 1950s, using the characteristic original bricks wherever they could be retrieved from the rubble. The rug trade returned, now under new conditions.

The second boom came in the 1960s and 1970s with the Wirtschaftswunder. A living room without a Persian rug was considered unfinished. Hamburg importers were once again the central hub, now with container ships instead of schooners and direct flights to Tehran. Until 1979.

The Iranian Revolution of 1979 and the Iran-Iraq war from 1980 onwards interrupted the supply chain for more than a decade. Turkish, Afghan, and Nepalese workshops stepped in. The Hamburg trade remained, but the business became more diverse. Today, Persian Tabriz, Turkish Kayseri, Afghan kilims, and Nepalese Tibetan rugs lie side by side in the warehouses.