Chinese cats

Julia has attempted to find a name for her new cat via an internet poll, and we have recommended to her the name Chifu which, although rather popular in Spain, sounds quite Chinese. On this occasion it came up whether the Chinese have traditionally kept cats.


Naturally the Chinese have kept cats, and primarily for catching mice (and, er, for consumption). Already the Book of Rites, attributed to Confucius, remembered about the hosts of cats defending the granaries against the mice and rats, to whom the emperor offered a sacrifice each year. Buddhist monasteries also kept cats for the protection of the holy scripts. Emperor Ming-Ti (A.D. 58-76) had them directly brought from India for the Temple of the White Horse where the first Chinese sutra translations were preserved. And Lu Yu (733-804), author of the Book of Tea has even dedicated a poem to the cats protecting his library and tea collection.


Cats being kept as pets are first remembered by the sources from the Tang period (618-907). This was an age when China was extremely open to the outside world, and the Iranian merchants arriving in large number from the West brought at this time the long-coated Persian cat to the country. This race became the favorite of the noble ladies, as it is attested both by classical novels and the paintings left to us from the Song period (960-1127) and later.

Classical cat paintings of a thousand years from the Taiwan National Museum

Demand generates offer, and Chinese painting, which has been traditionally differentiated by themes – bird and flower painting, mountain and water painting, horse painting, bamboo painting – also created the genre of cat painting. Cat painters were provided by special manuals – such manuals are being published and widely used even today –, and the rules of the new genre were summarized by such authoritative books like the 相貓經 Xiāngmāojīng, The Classic Book of Cats or Cat Painting, included among the great classic books (經 jīng). This latter has even used special terms for different fur colors and defined their order of rank:

至於毛色，以純黃為上，所謂「金絲貓」的就是。其次純白的，名「雪貓」，但廣東人不喜歡，叫它做「孝貓」，主不祥。再次是純黑的，叫「鐵貓」。純色的貓通名為「四時好」。褐黃黑相兼，名為「金絲褐」。黃白黑相兼，名「玳瑁斑」。黑背白肢，白腹，名為「烏雲蓋雪」。

As to the color of fur, the perfect yellow ones are called “golden cats” after their color. The second place is for the perfectly white ones, called “snow cats”. The Cantonese do not like this kind. They call it instead “the cat of filial piety” and consider it a [bad] omen. After this follow the perfectly black ones, called “iron cats”. The cats with a perfectly homogeneous color are called “excellent in all four seasons”. The yellow-brown-black cats are called “golden brown”. The yellow-white-black ones – like the one Julia has [translator’s note] – are called “turtle shell spotted”. And those with a black back and with white legs and belly are referred to as “black cloud covering the snow”.

Cat, crab and quail from the animal painting model book of Shen Zhou (1427-1509)

The establishment of cat painting as an autonomous genre was also supported by the fact that the word 貓 māo cat is a homonym of 耄 mào “eighty-ninety years old”, so such paintings were a perfect gift for a birthday. Especially if they also represented a 蝶 dié butterfly, because then the names of the two figures, pronounced loud, also had the meaning 耄耋 màodié “very long old age”.





The late Qing court painter Shen Chenlin (active between 1850 and 1870) composed a whole album with the title “Cats” or “Elders” which became an estimated coffee table book of the last emperors. The twelve pages album was published as a wall calendar by the Taiwan National Museum. It is worth to observe how much the last page follows the four hundred years earlier model page of Shen Zhou.



The tradition of the classical cat painters has been continued by Gu Yingzhi, professor of the Tianjin Academy of Art, one of the greatest authorities of cat painting in contemporary China.



The modern cat paintings by Wu Guangwei already trespass the border separating the stylized figures of classical Chinese painting from Western hyperrealism, so fashionable nowadays in China.


But the word 貓 māo cat is not only a homonym of “old age”, but also of the name of Chairman 毛 Mao. Even their meanings are somewhat close to each other, for the latter means hair or fur. No wonder that some contemporary Chinese avant-garde pictures, inspired by pop art, occasionally represent Chairman Mao with a cat’s face, perhaps as a kind of a shock therapy.

Qiu Jie: Chairman Mao, 2007

Qiu Jie: Chairman Mao on the lands, 2006

And finally Classical-inspired modern Chinese art also uses the motif of the cat without any secondary meaning, just for the sake of the gracious and elastic lines which are so akin to Chinese calligraphy.

Chen Yang

Din Yanyong

Tien Yuchang

Vlad Gerasimov is a Russian painter, but his pictures, inspired by Chinese art,
are very popular on Chinese sites as well.

Taipei, switchboard of the Cat 107 coffee bar imitating a shelf with classical Chinese books.
The titles of the books are: Seeing cats. Dreaming cats. Home with cats. Cats,
friends of the virtue. The cat has left for a coffee. The cat has come.
Cats around the world. One town, six cats. Encounter with cats.
On the switcher: Second volume, which, when pro-
nounced, also means “Switch it on”.