A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE SHIH TZU by Madonna Holko (A version of this article appeared in the June 2014 edition of SHOWSIGHT.)
M an’s affinity for dogs and vice versa over thousands of years is well-documented. While we have a tendency to believe that early dogs were quite large and fear- some, after all, they did have to fight for a living, Victor Joris, in his book The Complete Shih Tzu , has a photo of a statue from an eighth century Chinese grave showing a tall woman with a very small, Chihuahua-size dog, albeit with a flat face, at her feet; so, we know Toy dogs are not a mod- ern invention. That such small dogs were valued is also proven by reports of them being taken as spoils of war or being exchanged between rul- ers as special gifts. We are told that once Buddhism reached China, dogs became especially valuable because they were thought to be able to trans- form into lions for the Buddha to ride upon. Therefore, efforts were made to create dogs that looked like their interpretation of lions. One has only to look at Foo dogs to realize how fan- tastic their imaginations were! The custom of Chinese emperors giv- ing treasured dogs as gifts to foreign rulers continued throughout history, with early Pugs going to Holland in the eighteenth century and Pekingese to Queen Victoria in the nineteenth. It is interesting to note, however, that no Shih Tzu ever left China until the twentieth century and not until after the Chinese no longer had an empire with an Empress to protect them.
There were frequent descriptions of the dogs in the Imperial Palace, par- ticularly under this last Empress, Cixi (Tzu-hsi), which included “shag dogs” as well as the familiar Pugs and Pe- kingese, so we know they were there. Why they never got out of the country is a question without an answer. During the years of the empress’ life, she was very particular about the breeding of her dogs, and thus, very judgmental. Those not measur- ing up to her standards were lucky to find homes with minor royalty or
46 • T op N otch T oys , J anuary 2024
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