I am very curious about the construction of this 3x5 Art Deco Chinese rug. When I first saw it at a little antique shop, it was extremely dirty but the design was clearly the borderless opposing corner floral motif of a deco rug. I did not pay much attention to the fringe at the time. Eventually I traded a 4x6 90-line Phoenix medallion rug plus $50 for this smaller one. The Phoenix rug cost me around $40 at a thrift store, plus $70 to get it professionally cleaned. So this rug cost me a total of $160. After the purchase is when I noticed that the fringe did not have any knots, and although it did not look to be sewn on, it did have machine stitching running across. There is also some kind of a chain stitch across the back where the last row of knots ends and the apron begins. Otherwise it looks very much like a handknotted rug with an apparently hand sewn selvedge and definite wefts although the weft strings are somewhat hidden. I wonder of this is what is meant by a "closed back" when you cannot really see the wefts? I have seen these sell for anywhere from $100-$500 on Ebay.

Alright, so it is a closed back and that means it is hand knotted but what about the fringe? Why is the fringe machine stitched and was this a common practice Chinese Art Deco rugs? Would this feature serve to date the rug?

Thanks DustyB, I'm a big fan of Chinese deco rugs myself. I have another one that is more of a classic "Nichols" type:

This one is from an estate sale and I only paid $100. It is about 4x6 and I washed it twice to bring out the colors in the flowers. It took the washing and detergent fairly well, barely any fade. I overcast the fringes and repaired about four inches of selvedge using cotton from the fringe. As the picture shows it matches my apartment-sized sofa fairly well. But going back to the original post, the fringe on that rug does appear to be part of the foundation; it looks as though the rug was knotted and then the warps were stitched to create a machine finished fringe. I do not think the rug has enough wear to have had the fringe repaired, as the pile is very high in all areas. To me it seems it was taken off of the loom after hand-knotting, and then rather than making a knotted fringe, they used a machine to stitch warps into a fringe.