This is Ah Cum. Well, this is him as a taxidermied specimen. He was imported to Great Britain from China in 1896 to breed with the very small population of pekes that were living in that country. A strain had been developed from those pekes that had been stolen and smuggled out of China following the Second Opium War. He weighed 5 pounds:
He resembles a smaller version of the Tibetan spaniel. Tibetan spaniels are not spaniels at all. They are actually very close relatives of the Pekingese.They likely derived from a similar landrace that was once quite common in East Asia. It is actually that dog that is quite ancient, and the modern peke–and several other breeds– likely descend from it.
The Empress Dowager Cixi is responsible for taking that landrace and making the palace dogs of the Forbidden City a little bit different and a little bit smaller from this greater brachycephalic East Asian dog type. She actually had her own standard, which was augmented by regular drownings of puppies that didn’t meet her criteria and by breaking the muzzles of puppies so that they would grow even shorter.
But once Westerners got our mitts on these dogs, watch out out. The muzzle got even shorter. The head much more massive. The legs grew more crooked. And the coat touched the ground.
It became the dog about which I once wrote this little doggerel:
Weak-in-the-knees pekingese
The dog of the Chinese
And if you so please
You can hear it wheeze.
Remember, though, that the party line is the West has always improved that dogs bred by the savages in foreign lands.
And if you can’t see it, you must be blind. Or have a logic that differs from Western pekingese fanciers.
But when a breed has no purpose other than to be cuddled and exhibited, it can evolve any sort of bizarre conformation.
That’s what happened to the small, long-haired, brachycephalic East Asian dogs that were bred in Forbidden City.
But once it got out China and met with the Western fancy’s very scientific methods of dog breeding, it became extreme very quickly.
If a dog has no metric beyond what it looks like, then it can look like anything that its breeder so desire. It is comparatively easy to breed dogs to look a certain way. You just have to select for it, and within a few generations, you’ll have it.
It just took a few decades to get from the Ah Cum type of peke to the modern Western dog. Dogs evolve very rapidly in type, especially if the selection pressures are aided by a closed registry and the use of just a few select sires.
It is really an amazing thing. Modern pekes in the West are not only so exaggerated in appearance, they are now typically quite a bit larger than the Ah Cum type. Many exceed 10 pounds in weight, and the largest individuals can be 14 or15 pounds– three times the weight of Ah Cum.
I don’t know how anyone can say that this dog has been improved through its experience with the Western fancy.
The dog has become a cartoon.
Whatever it once was has been lost to the whims and caprices of human vanity.
‘Looty’ is one of the most famous founding members of the breed in England: http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v485/Pietoro/Dog%20Breed%20Historical%20Pictures/1861_Pekingese_Looty_byFriedrichKeyl.jpg
I have a photo of Lootie, but it’s not for the computer. And I don’t have a scanner.
He didn’t look as extreme as is in that painting. He really looked like a Tibetan spaniel.
Looty photographed on a palace side-chair
http://tinyurl.com/6jwe9r9
The photo I have of him is in Thurston’s Lost History of the Canine.
That dog on the chair looks nothing like him. He looks like a spotted Tibetan spaniel.
this probably is wrong and a completly crazy idea but as the tibby spaniel looks so like the old pekes could the tibby have actually come from those pekes. i know tibbys are suposed to come form tibet but there history is not that well known. perhaps they were the ordinary peoples dog and are more pekes than the current show peke which looks more like a mop than a dog. probably a completly mad idea but what do people think.
I think the ancestor actually resembled a tibbie more than a peke. Pekes only existed as they did because of the imperial family in China.
I don’t know if tibbies have been included in the ancient dog genetic studies. I woudln’t be surprised if they are also ancient.
They aren’t nearly as common as pekingese, so they may have not been included.
Dogs of the Tibetan spaniel type have been found in “kitchen middens’ in the Gobi desert that have been dated to 10,000 years before present.
Kitchen middens are where ancient people put all of their rubbish. The little dogs likely scavenged in the kitchen middens a lot.
ah so it is possible. if back then as with us in the west dogs were just a type rather than a breed then the 2 breeds could have been one type of small brachycephalic companion dog that was kept by the ordianary folk and some special ones were taken by the emperor etc, these dogs eventually became looty and his family who were then turned into the modern day mop by the western show breeders and the others which were kept by the ordinary people cause they werent quite as nice eventually became the tibby (no insult to the tibetan spaniel which i think is a very nice little dog) or a dog similar to the tibby which also later came to the west and was called the tibetan spaniel because they could think of nothing else to call it and it couldnt be a peke because we already had pekes and it wasnt completly like them.
i remember watching a programme last year, i think it was paul merton (a british comedian) who did a tour round china and he went into an ordinary chinese peasant home and they had a small short coated dog that looked very like the older pekes and not much like the modern mop.
what do you think possible or not really.
Some more paintings of early Pekes:
1850:
http://tinyurl.com/4or3ukx
1890(ish):
http://tinyurl.com/4alcm7w
The resemblance to a modern Tibbie is uncanny. I do not doubt at all that there is a strong relationship between the breeds.