{"id":19424,"date":"2023-09-15T13:51:03","date_gmt":"2023-09-15T12:51:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/royalasiaticsociety.org\/?p=19424"},"modified":"2023-09-15T13:51:03","modified_gmt":"2023-09-15T12:51:03","slug":"the-history-of-lapdogs-in-china-post-by-2023-staunton-prize-winner-dr-kelsey-granger","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/royalasiaticsociety.org\/the-history-of-lapdogs-in-china-post-by-2023-staunton-prize-winner-dr-kelsey-granger\/","title":{"rendered":"The History of (Lap)dogs in China – post by 2023 Staunton Prize winner Dr Kelsey Granger"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Society is delighted to award the 2023 Sir George Staunton Prize for outstanding article to Dr Kelsey Granger for her submission entitled From Tomb-Keeper to Tomb-Occupant: The Changing Conceptualisation of Dogs in Early China<\/em>, which was published in the JRAS earlier this year (Vol. 3,\u00a0 Issue 33). The article is Open Access and so is also available to non-subscribers here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Dr. Kelsey Granger is an Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow affiliated with Ludwig-Maximilian University, Munich. In this role, she is researching the social significance of horses in early Chinese postal stations like Xuanquan alongside Prof. Armin Selbitschka. Her doctoral project, completed at the University of Cambridge in 2022, centred on the phenomenon of lapdog-keeping among Tang and Song elites (i.e., c. <\/em>600\u20131200) as well as the practice\u2019s remarkable Silk Road connections. Related canine research has been published in the Bulletin of SOAS<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Dr Granger will be giving a talk to the Society early next year. In the meantime she has kindly produced the following post to pique your interest and introduce some of the main themes of her research.<\/p>\n

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The History of (Lap)dogs in China<\/strong><\/p>\n

Dr. Kelsey Granger, Ludwig-Maximilian University Munich<\/strong><\/p>\n

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Whenever I introduce my doctoral project, completed at the University of Cambridge in 2022, to fellow Sinologists, it never fails to raise eyebrows. The history of lapdogs is, surprisingly, an understudied phenomenon in Chinese animal studies. That is not to say that attempts have not been made, with Victorian British dog-fanciers producing reams of well-meaning, though terribly inaccurate, histories tracing the lineage of the modern-day Pekingese back into the distant past. Much like Queen Victoria and her Pekingese dog Looty, purportedly stolen from the ransacked Summer Palace, emperors from time immemorial all had their \u2018palace dogs\u2019, and the dogs have not changed an iota in the millennia since! In the realm of Sinology, scholars like Edward Schafer and Berthold Laufer were more cautious, believing that lapdogs entered the scene in the Tang \u5510 dynasty (618\u2013907). In the twenty-first century, Chinese Sinologists have only just begun to write cursory articles about the many Tang poems, paintings, and ceramics featuring these small, aesthetic dogs. Despite this, the wider history and social significance of Chinese lapdogs and lapdog-keeping remains just as vague and just as vaunted as in the early 1900s.<\/p>\n

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Photograph of Looty the Pekingese taken in 1865. Royal Collection Trust. \u00a9 His Majesty King Charles III 2023.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

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I myself became intensely curious about lapdogs in Chinese history when watching the annual Cruft\u2019s Dog Show with my own beloved lapdog Birdie, a Japanese Chin. Cruft\u2019s official breed information stated that these dogs were traded between Japanese and Chinese princesses during the Tang dynasty. This struck me on two levels: first, that lapdogs were considered to be prestige goods during this zenith of Silk Road exchange, and second that women were primarily engaged with lapdog-keeping. During my M.A. at SOAS, London in 2017\u20132018, I wrote a short paper on lapdogs in the famed silk painting \u2018Zanhua shin\u00fc tu\u2019 \u7c2a\u82b1\u4ed5\u5973\u5716 (Picture of Ladies Wearing Flowers in their Hair), wherein two lapdogs frolic among elegantly-dressed court ladies, but this ultimately left me with more questions than answers. Why were lapdogs included in this garden scene? How come the association between lapdogs and women was decidedly positive, when women being connected with other animals was so often negative (consider the seductive fox-woman and weretiger)? And what did the lapdog ultimately mean <\/em>in literature and art from this period? After a four-year Ph.D. studying lapdog-keeping in the Tang and Song \u5b8b (960\u20131279) dynasties, I feel I can finally answer some of these questions (and many others that arose along the way). And yet even still, the social and economic relevance of medieval Chinese lapdog-keeping continues to astound me.<\/p>\n

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\u2018Ladies Wearing Flowers in their Hair\u2019. Liaoning Provincial Museum. Public Domain image.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

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Much as Laufer and Schafer suggested, lapdogs arrived suddenly in China sometime in the mid seventh century, when official records state that the oasis kingdom of Turfan gifted a pair of small dogs that could perform tricks to the Tang court. Elite women were the primary keepers of lapdogs during the Tang period, being described as coddling and toying with them in their chambers. It was in these female-occupied areas of the house that young boys and adolescent girls encountered the diminutive dogs, often at risk of being bitten (in one story, a boy even loses his penis to a vicious lapdog!). The reality of lapdogs being so inextricably tied to female bodies and spaces was translated into a number of paintings, ceramics, stories, and poems. This even extended, perhaps not surprisingly, to erotic Tang poetry and paintings, wherein the lapdog was a scintillating marker of private female chambers and implied sexual intimacy.<\/p>\n

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Seated woman on a stool with a lapdog by her slipper, eighth century. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public Domain image.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

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To prove that these diminutive, playful creatures really were the first lapdogs in the Chinese textual and artistic record, I had to delve much further back into the past than I had initially anticipated. Dogs in a general sense appear time and again across the full range of Chinese history, most often in association with guarding, hunting, and \u2013 perhaps surprisingly for non-Sinologists \u2013 graves. Scouring archaeological reports and anomaly tales alike for lapdogs drew my attention to a much more widely-studied aspect of Chinese canine history: dogs in pre-imperial Chinese tombs. My initial findings were published as a video essay with Trinity College, Dublin, available on YouTube here:<\/p>\n

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