The Anglo Persian Oil Company (APOC) and its marketing and distribution branch, the British Petroleum (BP), participated in the British Empire Exhibition at Wembley, 1924, by exhibiting their products and managerial skills through a stand called the “‘Khan’ of the Anglo Persian Oil Company.” Teeming with Islamic architectural iconography and complex semantic and formal syntheses, this comparatively small commercial pavilion represents an architectural entity that reckons with the role of Persia (Iran, since 1935) in shaping and constituting the new political and economic order of the British Empire. The “Khan,” purportedly modeled after Persian caravanserais—in tandem with promotional materials and advertisements published and distributed in various media before, during, and after the British Empire Exhibition—provides an image, an identity, and a brand for the APOC. Assuming the Company’s vital agency for securing power for the British Empire, this paper investigates the implications and ramifications of APOC’s decision to opt for the “Khan” to represent the British Empire. This leads to questions regarding what agency the pavilion might be read to have within both the Exhibition, and the BP’s and the APOC’s history of extraction, exploitation, production, and distribution of oil. In a more general sense, by surpassing orientalists’ interpretations and challenging modernization theories, this paper investigates the “Khan” to ask questions such as: Where was empire figured? What form did it take in architecture? And more importantly, how can architecture manifest how an empire thinks? A genealogical study, coupled with a philological analysis, of the Khan’s architecture reveals that the pavilion’s architectural typology is derived from the Islamic mausoleums’ prototype. This paper concludes that APOC adopted and (mis)represented this prototype, which has historically evolved out of the Indo-Saracenic architecture—influenced heavily by Persian architectural traditions and religious icons—to celebrate an empire of oil. Tightening its grip over the vital flow of power (oil) during the first decades of the twentieth century, the APOC uses architecture (as a part of its propaganda machine) to imagine itself and instill this symbolic image in its customers and clients, simultaneously as the Khan and the Imam—the political, military, and religious leader. This dominance over a vast territory of the Persianate world, spanning from north-east India to southwest Iraq, is enjoined not by military force, rather by re-inscribing technologies of exploitation into the age-old positions of traditional leadership, governance, trade, and symbolism.