Bamboo Trail
Chongqing – “the biggest city you’ve never heard of,” one magazine headline proclaims – is the fastest-growing city in China, with a population of some 32 million. Skyscrapers are erected by the dozens in this mountain-ringed city, eating up blocks of what was once farmland. With an economy ignited by the sweeping economic changes of the 1980s, Chongqing is a manufacturing mega-hub, churning out chemicals, cement and automobiles for an ever-growing Chinese population.
Things weren’t always this way. For centuries, Chongqing was a remote outpost on the bluffs of the surging Yangtze River. The subtropical climate, punctuated by the occasional monsoon, results in a blanket of fog draping the city for half the year; local legend held that the mist existed to insulate its notoriously stranger-adverse residents. This summer, Markus Monroe of Lanzendorf, Austria, spent three weeks in Chongqing (pronounced “Chun-Ching”). But the economic boom wasn’t what drew him there.
A Cane Corso breeder for 15 years, Monroe had grown disenchanted with the growing prohibition against ear cropping, not just in his own country, but throughout Western Europe. Then, two years ago, he saw a photo of a Chongqing Dog.
“It was love at first sight,” he says of the native dog of southwestern China’s Sichuan province. The impressive dogs, with their Molosser-style heads, naturally pricked ears and odd, bamboo-shaped tails, captured his imagination. “It was the perfect breed, and I tried to find out where these dogs came from.”
The Chonqing Dog is native to the city in Sihuan province that gives it its name. Chongqing is China’s biggest inland port city.
At first glance, the Chongqing Dog looks like a designer dog – French Bulldog meets Chinese Crested, perhaps. But touring the city and its neighboring villages with fellow Corso breeder Ljubomir Strajano Crnojakic of Serbia, Monroe learned that the Chongqing Dog has remained genetically isolated for centuries, presumably locking in the more unusual aspects of type, including the rough, sparse coat, undershot bite, spoon-shaped ears and rodent-like tail. Known by a number of names –including the Chuandong Dog, East Sichuan Hunting Dog and Bamboo Ratter – all Chongqing Dogs have a distinctive blue tongue, some with blue-black points.
Two Chonqing puppies at play. The breed has an almost terrier-like energy and exuberance for life.
Monroe visited dozens of breeders all over Chongqing during his visit, looking at more than 300 dogs. He noted three distinct styles, with different sizes and body shapes.
The first two types are hunting dogs, used by the villagers in the countryside to hunt rabbit, fox and badger. These Chongqing Dogs are racier, with longer muzzles and a build that Monroe likens to that of a Thai Ridgeback. The hunting dogs come in two sizes – small and medium – with the former used to go to ground for foxes and other den animals. When used on game, the dogs work as a pack, with a style that Monroe says is reminiscent of the Dogo Argentino.
The third type of Chongqing Dog, which is the largest and most Molosser like, is bred in the city proper as a guard dog. “It is a completely different type, with a very short muzzle and very muscular build,” along the lines of a smallish Dogo Canario, Monroe explains. He describes the city dogs’ heads as “heavy and completely molossoid,” evoking a Boxer or Bulldog. With the city dogs, breeding emphasis is placed on size and guarding ability.
Two “city type” Chongqing Dogs. Because they are bred for guarding, their have more of a molossoid appearance.
Whether they are a hunter or a guardian, reared in the countryside or city, Chongqing Dogs are bred for function, pure and simple. “In China, they are just breeding the best hunting dog to the best hunting bitch – they don’t care if the dog has a bad tail, or a bad bite,” Monroe says. “There’s no breeding program the way we understand it – it’s a completely different way of thinking” from what show breeders from Europe or North America are accustomed to. Monroe says he saw only two completely hairless Chongqing Dogs, though they are thought to be lucky and so are highly prized and in demand as stud dogs. The dogs’ sparse coat – covering thick, almost horse-like skin – makes sense in steamy Chongqing, whose long summers are among the hottest and most humid in China.
Chongqing is a rapidly growing metropolis (above). But the topography of the surrounding countryside shows why it was isolated for so many centuries (below).
The highest-profile local breeder is the Chongqing Dog Conservation Center (www.chongqingdog.com.cn), which networks with local hunters to procure pregnant bitches, and finds a brisk market for them both inside and outside China. Dogs sell for about $1,500 locally and can reach $2,500-plus for top breeding prospects sent abroad; Chongqing’s per capita income is only about $3,300 a year. Finding city-bred dogs is more difficult, as those breeders do not have an Internet presence or a public breeding association, and for good reason: Owning a dog that weighs more than eight kilograms, or about 20 pounds, is illegal in Chongqing. As a result, the city breeders keep their dogs under wraps, refraining from walking them on the street, where they could be confiscated by police.
In 2003, an outbreak of the deadly SARS virus resulted in a government edict to destroy all dogs in the city and its environs. “The breeders said this was the most difficult time for all breeders of Chongqing Dogs,” Monroe says. Knowing that to insist they had no dogs would not be credible, the breeders handed over half their dogs, and hid the rest. As a result of the outbreak, more than half the population of this already rare breed was exterminated.
The Chongqing Dog’s tail is said to resemble a bamboo shoot, and is an important part of breed type.
During his visit, Monroe tried to get the country and city breeders together to discuss their different dogs, and learn from one another. No such luck – the two groups refused to meet, each saying the other’s style of dog was not the true Chongqing Dog.
Demographic trends are likely to undo some of that chauvinism. Today, China is undergoing an intense urbanization, with 400 million people – more than the entire population of the United States – expected to move from its villages to cities in the next 15 years. Not surprisingly, this has had an impact on the Chonquing Dog. “A breeder from the city told me that in the last 10 years, a lot of people from the villages have come to the city and are bringing their dogs,” Monroe explains. “And there has been a lot of crossbreeding.”
What both the country and city breeders share, however, is their mutual devotion to the breed. “All the breeders, from the city or outside, they love these dogs,” Monroe says. They also all maintain that the Chongqing Dog is an original, natural breed, untainted by any influence from other Chinese breeds outside the region.
Demand for Chongqing Dogs outside of China has increased exponentially in recent years.
Regardless of provenance, the dogs are also incredibly long lived. “I saw a lot of dogs that were 17, 18, even 19 years old,” Monroe says. Temperaments were uniformly friendly: Even the city guard dogs, while they barked ferociously at Monroe, permitted themselves to be petted once they were unchained by their owners and properly introduced to him.
Squabbles among their own kind are another matter, however. When a fight begins between two Chongqing Dogs, “they don’t stop,” Monroe says simply. “It’s like terriers. When two Cane Corsos start fighting, and one goes down, the other realizes it is over and stops. With these dogs, if they start to fight … it’s a disaster.”
After two years of planning on Monroe’s part and three weeks in quarantine, six Chongqing Dogs – two from the hunter-focused Conservation Center and the other four from city breeders – arrived in Austria. His breeding partner in Serbia has four dogs, all from the Conservation Center.
“I have both hunting and city types, and right now I want to see how they develop,” Monroe explains, adding that he was careful to choose puppies from different families and bloodlines. “I’m studying right now, trying to understand everything about the dogs.”
Chonqing Dogs come in a variety of colors, including cream white with orange points and pure black, though a combination of orange and black is most common.
The Chongqing Dog is not recognized by the Fédération Cynologique Internationale, and if and when it is, there will be some difficult questions at hand, which Monroe is obviously contemplating: Should the breed continue to maintain its different function-based styles and sizes? Should one type prevail, to the exclusion of the others? Or is there a more homogenized middle ground that synthesizes the best of each?
Those looming questions aside, Monroe thinks the dogs have an intrinsic appeal, especially among Cane Corso fanciers. “In Russia there are already five Chongqing Dog breeders,” he says. “Just like me, they were breeding Cane Corsos, and when cropping ears became banned in much of Europe, they started looking for another breed.”
He has also fielded a number of queries from Scandinavian countries like Sweden and Denmark, where many of the bullie breeds, such as American Pitbull Terriers, American Staffordshire Terriers and Staffordshire Bull Terriers, are no longer permitted to be bred. “A lot of people want to buy a similar-looking dog, with ears that are up,” he explains. Even the larger Chongqing Dogs top out at about 20 inches tall, and 70 or so pounds. What remains to be seen is how successful Western breeding programs will be. Some earlier, albeit smaller-scale exports of Chongqing Dogs to North America fizzled in the whelping box.
“When both dogs came over, they had virtually no hair and looked more like Chihuahua-sized, hairless Shar-Peis than anything else,” remembers Laura Kelsch of Schomberg, Ontario, Canada, who imported a male named Dai Wei’s Huo Long (“Fiery Dragon”) and a female, Dai Wei’s Huo Feng Huang (“Fiery Phoenix”), from the Chongqing Dog Conservation Center in 2008. Like others who imported early dogs, she found poor nutrition to be an issue, and home-cooking augmented with some kibble soon had them thriving.
Kelsch’s two Chinese-bred dogs, from left: male Dragon and female Phoenix, who has a heavier, more Bulldog-like head and build.
An accidental breeding between Dragon and a female Bulldog yielded a litter of puppies who retained many of their Chongqing characteristics, including the signature prick ears.
Kelsch bred the pair twice, with disappointing results. All the litters had disproportionately high numbers of cleft palates – more than half the puppies – all accompanied by hare lips, and there was nothing to go forward with. An “oops” breeding with one of her Bulldogs yielded a litter of uniformly red puppies with the same prick ears; they were a bit larger and beefier, thanks to their Bulldog mother, and they all lacked the bald patches and sparse coats of their Chongqing father.
While there is still much to learn about the Chongqing Dog, this much is clear: For having been bred solely for function and very minimally for aesthetics, these dogs are remarkably consistent and identifiable as a breed. As Kelsch’s Bulldog cross showed, they breed true, retaining many of the characteristics that presumably took centuries, if not millennia, to fix. And, as feisty, unflappable mini-Molossers, they have an undeniable visual appeal, from their squelchy faces to their unusually thick, almost shimmering skin.
Today, the Chonquing Dog is said to be as rare as another local species, the panda bear. But now that the breed has landed, with a flutter of bamboo leaves, on the international stage, that’s very likely to change.
Primitive and otherworldly, the Chongqing Dog has a magnetic appeal that is difficult to describe.
Time-Misted Origins
Chongqing Dog fanciers say that theirs is an ancient and natural breed, depicted in excavated statues from the Han dynasty that date back almost two thousand years.
Ceramic dog from the late Han dynasty excavated near Chongqing.
But Hing Chao, a cultural preservationist and columnist for Hong Kong’s Tatler magazine, goes back even further, positing an ancient connection between the Chongqing Dog and the Molosser breeds so familiar to us in the West.
Chao notes that an early, warlike tribe called the Xirong, who settled in the western province of Sichuan around 1765-1122 BCE, could very well have traveled with dogs of this type. He also compares photos of the Chongqing Dog and the Alano Español, an ancient bulldog brought to Spain by the Alani, nomadic pastoralists from 5th Century Iran. Like the Chongqing Dog, the modern-day Alano Español has high-set ears (albeit cropped), slightly undershot bite, short muzzle and sometimes a black mask, and is only a few inches bigger than the tallest Chongqing Dog.
“As far as I am concerned, their phenotypical resemblance is remarkable and bespeaks of a common ancestry in the distant past,” Chao writes. “If I may take a further leap of faith, by postulating a connection between the ancient Xirong and Scythians – two of the oldest nomadic groups in the world – may we perhaps even hypothesize an ancient dog breed of the Molosser type originating in northwestern China/inner Asia which eventually spread to Europe through the trading and warlike activities of the ancient nomads?”
Was there a long-ago genetic link between the Chongqing Dog and the Spanish Alano (at right)?