Business is so swift that Mr Butt's emporium, Oriental Carpets, has been known to shift 75 per cent of a shipment within two weeks of its arrival.

Put another way, this store is not alone in selling an average of 100 carpets every month.

Hong Kong's pole position in the carpet market (the first stores opened in the early 1950s) comes from the oriental tradition, its free-market status and its cosmopolitan mix of well-travelled individuals who, through Mr Butt's experience, have developed a well-honed taste in textiles through exposure. This means that the diversity of carpet styles in Hong Kong is unsurpassed.

All of this does not make it any easier for novice buyers and in no way does this article pretend to be a guide for buyers - only to say that above all, oriental carpets are pieces of functional art and that their worth is an emotional one; they are as valuable only as much as they are moved.

Fiscal value wavers according to geographical market place and the geopolitical climate of Western Asia - including Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Azerbaijan, Turkey and parts of the former Soviet Union which form the ethnic origins of this immense and complex craft.

Persian carpets are selling at one- tenth the price paid under the shah, due largely to the continual devaluation of the Iranian currency.

The beauty of oriental carpets is found primarily in their designs which form an anthropological study of the cultures of their weaves and are closely bound up with centuries of tradition.

After 20 years in the trade, Mr Butt is always coming across designs that are similar but different according to the individual's hand and eye.

'This is what keeps me enchanted by rugs,' he says.

However designs can be deciphered roughly by categorising oriental carpets into four distinctions: tribal, village, city and workshop carpets, the latter being the most technically advanced and made by weavers at the pinnacle of their profession for the rulers of the great Islamic courts as far back as the 16th century.

Predominantly curvilinear and floral in design, denoting abundance, these carpets can boast up to 540 knots per square centimetre and take one weaver more than a year to complete.

The vogue in oriental carpets in this decade is for the tribal or nomadic rugs made trendy by decorators in the 1970s and which now grace the homes of students to bankers across the world. These rugs are coarser and more primitive by design.

For centuries they have been hand knotted to provide warmth, colour and heritage among the tribes - the Turkmen of Turkestan and the Qashqai of Iran, to name two - whose lives of hardship revolved around moving their sheep between summer and winter grazing in the unforgiving and monotone landscapes of Western Asia.

Due to persecution the vast majority of these nomads have, since the early 80s, been herded into refugee camps where they now (if at all) weave less out of cultural heritage and more out of exploitation.

But still their naive designs have often be seen as the fingerprints of their personal experience: their camels, sheep, drinking vessels and surrounding plant life, even butterflies.

Take Afghan tribal rugs, woven in the 80s, as a specific example of tribal experience. It is not unusual to decipher crudely formed motifs resembling helicopters, AK47 rifles, spherical bombs, coffee pots, oak leaves and shrubs.

These designs recount the memories of Afghan women weavers who watched their men murdered and experienced rape themselves when Soviet soldiers plundered their territory in search of rebels during the infamous war in Afghanistan at that time.

Abandoned and then having eventually found refuge in camps along the Pakistan border, these women plotted their living nightmares in woollen knots.

Today, now that the horrors of war have subsided, they cease to weave these images.

By the end of the century it is likely that tribal textiles will cease to exist at all. Travelling gypsies are under threat and most have been herded into camps where weaving is not continued.

Their exposure to the trappings of 20th-century television also plays a part in their fading craft.

Today, Pakistan is one of the world's most prolific carpet producers. Many weavers fled there from Iran with the arrival of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in 1979 who banned all exports.

In Hong Kong, the business is for city carpets, commercially produced in silk and wool for overseas sales. The designs and colour schemes are often purposely adapted according to national fashions.

The most prolific design, associated with first-time rug buyers, is the Bokhara: that which is most likely to be spotted in shades of pink and grey in suburban drawing rooms.

The simple geometric, grid pattern refers to the bird's-eye view of flower heads, the diamond shapes in between refer to butterflies and the block and tendril motifs in the carpet border are woven translations of tarantulas so that the whole image reflects the pollination process as understood by the weavers.

This leaves the village carpet industry also fairly responsive to the demands of a local, not international, market. A single carpet is woven by up to four women who have exchanged their nomadic existence for a fixed location, traditionally in the western regions of Turkey and the Bijar region of northwest Iran.

Upright looms are erected alongside the house and designs, based largely on flowers, are created according to a mix of traditional and bought designs, to sell on the open market.

In order to appreciate the beauty and complexity of carpet design, scholars have made the analogy with music.

In a book on the subject, leading expert Jon Thompson wrote of carpets: 'Their visible surface is covered with thousands, sometimes millions of tufts of wool and the resulting minute points of colour are arranged like the individual notes of a melody into motifs and patterns.' It is this musical quality, this rhythm of pattern that speak to each of us on a personal level and unleashes the addictive personality.

'It is impossible to stop buying,' says Mr Butt. 'Carpets are attractive, they are versatile and they adapt so easily to our lifestyles.

'They are very different from paintings. You can throw them on the floor and abuse them and they look better for that abuse; that's what I love about them.' How lucky that we can enjoy art and enjoy treating it badly at the same time.