The Surprising Imperial History of the Pekingese Dog

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In April 1905, the Ladies’ Kennel Association put on a special show with an unusual guest: a visitor from the Chinese embassy, invited to judge the club members’ beloved Pekingese dogs. What followed, however, has been described as “a pantomime of manners,” as the silk-robed Wang Yun and his British hostesses butted heads over what counted as a good dog. Blocked from membership in the men-only Kennel Club, the upper-class women dominating the peke-breeding world comically “attempted to teach a Chinese man what to look for in a Pekingese dog while appearing to defer to his superior wisdom,” cultural studies scholar Sarah Cheang reports.

This clash of opinions at the spring dog show speaks to a wider conflict of race and gender that can be found in the intriguing annals of peke-breeding history in the British Empire. Mad as they were for Pekingese dogs from the Victorian age onward, female British canine aficionados in high society were caught up in a trend that charted the rise and fall of empires.

“Within this realm of nostalgia, the dogs functioned as potent souvenirs, linking metropolis and colony through close connections between colonial conquest, sentimental pet rearing, and domestic spaces,” writes Cheang, noting that owning and breeding the Pekingese dog had become “an important expression of upper-class and imperialistic British femininities.”

Pekes entered Britain amid the nineteenth-century Opium Wars, making their first appearance after conquering European forces ransacked Beijing’s Summer Palace in 1860 for art and other valuables. Among the haul from the palace ruins were five Pekingese dogs. As small, toy-sized lapdogs, these “Chinese spaniels” were considered appropriate for women, as opposed to more masculine breeds. One was named Looty and given to Queen Victoria. The rest fell into the hands of the duchesses of Richmond and Wellington, whose plans to breed their new pets sparked a market for peke imports.

“Through fancy dress, women could engage in a fuller fantasy of Imperial China, in which British homes were imagined as Chinese palaces and British daughters, as Chinese princesses.”

Sarah Cheang

By World War I, pekes were the top pedigree toy breed in Britain, a status that they would enjoy for nearly fifty more years: “the breed of choice for smart British women,” as Cheang puts it. More dogs would come into Britain through diplomatic avenues, especially as the formal recognition of the Pekingese as a breed around 1900 coincided with Western powers’ successful incursion into the Forbidden City. Against this backdrop, writes Cheang, “the name of ‘Pekingese’ dog takes on an added significance.” The victorious British harbored romantic views toward a subjugated foreign culture, which they associated with a bygone past.

Colonial nostalgia fueled what Cheang calls “an array of incredible assertions to be indulged within an orientalist fantasy of exotic palaces and silk-clad mandarins.” For example, one popular legend held that Pekingese dogs could tap into ancestral memory to recognize the color yellow as a symbol of Chinese royal power. Cheang notes that such assumptions “may seem ridiculous.” At the same time, they fit the dog owners’ eugenicist ideologies around breeding, racial purity, and hierarchies of class and race.

In fact, British women could also participate in Britain’s imperialist relationship with China through their intimate household connection with Pekingese dogs.

“As an object of feminine empowerment, the peke’s Imperial history was an extremely important and defining element,” writes Cheang. “The legendary Chinese palace genesis was at the forefront of their identity as ‘high-born’ animals, and so, like living imperial heirlooms, they conferred ‘high-born’ status upon their mistresses.”

For instance, Pekingese breeder Lilburne MacEwen—the very woman who would go on to clash with Wang Yun at the dog show—was featured in a 1903 ladies’ magazine article about her peke-breeding. The magazine ran a photo of her young daughter posing with three pekes—“who, being also bred by Mrs. MacEwen, could almost be considered as Miss MacEwen’s siblings,” Cheang suggests.

The girl is in sumptuous Chinese garb, while the dogs rest on a table covered in Chinese brocade—proof that “women could be richly invested in colonial rule,” as Cheang explains. “Through fancy dress, women could engage in a fuller fantasy of Imperial China, in which British homes were imagined as Chinese palaces and British daughters, as Chinese princesses.”

In this way, the breeding of Pekingese dogs—a hobby that was dominated by well-to-do British women—allowed the dogs themselves to “be physically and conceptually shaped to reflect the breeders’ own ruling-class identities.” Owning a dog with origins in China’s defeated imperial culture thus signaled “victory of Western imperialism in China and also the high social and imperial status of Pekingese dog owners.”

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