DOGS OF CHINA AND JAPAN 



before their eyes." * "At Lyons in Gaul they were sold for 

 ten gold pieces each, and at Bologna for forty pounds." 



In 1588 Harrison speaks of the Maltese, " the smaller they 

 be and thereto if they have a hole in the fore part of their 

 heads the better they are accepted." * This appears to be the 

 first European reference to the " stop " now characteristic of 

 all the breeds of Chinese toy-dog. 



Overland communication between China and the Byzantine 

 Empire existed up to the time of Hung Wu in A.D. 1371. 

 Constantinople was taken by the Turks in 1453 ; exchange of 

 dogs may therefore have taken place up to this period, but 

 has not been recorded since the T'ang Dynasty. 



The literati continued to call the small race of Imperial 

 dogs " Fu-lin " or " Folin " dog up to the middle of the 

 seventeenth century. This may have been a piece of the 

 literary conservatism common among Chinese writers. The 

 name would, no doubt, have persisted still longer had the 

 breed continued unchanged. 



From the latter part of the twelfth century two other breeds 

 the long-coated Chinese Lion-dog and the Lo-chiang dog 

 were known to the Chinese. Probably no race was called 

 1 Pekingese '" in China much earlier than the seventeenth 

 century, though the Imperial court had taken up residence at 

 Peking about the middle of the thirteenth century. The 

 people of Peking have no special distinctive name for the 

 " Pekingese " type of dog. This presumably is evidence in 

 favour of its having always been the predominating type among 

 the pet-dogs of the city. No paintings on porcelain or porce- 

 lain models of the Pekingese type, dating from earlier than 

 the beginning of the nineteenth century, are known to exist. 



It has been suggested that the Japanese toy-dog, whose 

 importation to Japan dates from the seventh century, indicates 



* " Toy Dogs and their Ancestors," pp. 31, 32. 

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