First ‘home cat’ reached China 1,400 years ago via Tang dynasty Silk Road

From temple courtyards to trendy cafes, cats have long captivated hearts in China.\nNow, scientists have shed light on the pet’s origin in the country, suggesting its earliest presence dates back to the Tang dynasty (618-907), with its arrival via the Silk Road.\nA Tang dynasty provincial governor was recorded as the first person in Chinese history to name his dozens of cats. The avid cat lover also set aside a large area at home to play with them.\nWu Zetian, China’s first and only woman emperor, is also said to have gifted a pet cat to her ministers – a story that is among the oldest written accounts with a clear description of a domestic cat.\nIn a paper published late last month, an international team of scientists led by Luo Shujin, investigator at Peking University’s school of life sciences, found that the earliest known domestic cat in China was radiocarbon dated to the year 730, during the mid-Tang dynasty.\nIt was genetically inferred to have been fully or partially white and was excavated from the northwestern Chinese province of Shaanxi, in a hub on the Silk Road.\nThe team said domestic cats were likely brought to China by Silk Road merchants around 1,400 years ago, much later than the Neolithic period or the Han dynasty (206BC-AD220) as previously thought.\nThe researchers from institutions in Britain, China, Germany and Portugal analysed 22 small felid bones, which were unearthed from 14 archaeological sites across China spanning 5,000 years, to trace the history of human-cat interactions and the arrival of domestic cats.\n“Intriguingly, the earliest depictions of domestic cats in China date to the same period as [the earliest known domestic cat], found in painted motifs within two Tang dynasty tombs in central China,” the team wrote.\n\n\n“These historical records hint that domestic cats were regarded as exotic pets and were likely kept among the ancient Chinese elite, reflecting their relatively recent introduction to China.”\nThe cat, however, is not one of the 12 Chinese zodiac animals: the rat, ox, tiger, rabbit, dragon, snake, horse, goat, monkey, rooster, dog and pig.\nWhile the origins of the zodiac system are unclear, it was firmly in place by the latter half of the Han dynasty, which ended almost 400 years before the Tang.\nThe team published their findings in the peer-reviewed journal Cell Genomics.\n“Our findings indicate that domestic cats were among the latest domesticated animals introduced to China, arriving much later than other Eurasian domesticates such as cattle, sheep and goats and horses,” the team wrote.\n“The earliest domestic cats were probably brought into China by trading caravans via a series of Silk Road hubs rather than through the gradual diffusion associated with agrarian communities.\n“This rapid introduction likely brought domestic cats to the middle reaches of the Yellow River region in present-day western and central China, the cradle of ancient Chinese civilisations.”\nThe earliest domestic cat identified out of 22 felid bone samples, 14 of which were from domestic cats, was unearthed at Tongwancheng, a key hub on the Silk Road in western China.\nThis cat is one of two of the earliest known domestic cats discovered along the Silk Road’s midpoint and in eastern Eurasia. The other is an ancient cat from Kazakhstan, dating from 775-940.\nThe team said the genomic analysis of 130 modern and ancient Eurasian cat specimens suggested that Chinese domestic cats originated in the Levant, a region along the eastern Mediterranean shores – around today’s Israel, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria.\n