The Khan Rustem Pasha is a historic caravanserai built in the Ottoman period to provide lodging, storage, and stabling for merchants travelling the trade route between Aleppo and Damascus. Caravanserais followed a standard plan: a large rectangular courtyard surrounded by two-storey galleries, with stables and goods storage on the ground floor and sleeping rooms above, and a single fortified gate that closed at night. The khan provided security in an era before banking — merchants could store their goods safely while negotiating in the market.
In more recent times the building was converted into a handicrafts market, its courtyard and arcade shops occupied by vendors selling textiles, inlaid woodwork, brass and copper goods, and soap from Aleppo's ancient soap-making tradition. This adaptive reuse preserved the building while giving it a new economic function in the city. The courtyard's proportions and the rhythm of its arcaded galleries remain legible beneath the market activity, and the khan is one of the better-preserved examples of Ottoman commercial architecture in central Syria. The nearby Khan Assad Pasha al-Azem, built by the same family as the Azm Palace, served a similar function on the northern side of the old city.