Royal cats of Japan, Korea and Siam: court cats in diaries, poems and palace records

This page looks at cats kept at three Asian royal courts: the emperors of Heian Japan, King Sukjong of Joseon Korea, and the kings of Siam, now Thailand. It draws on the records those courts left: an emperor's diary, a court lady's book, Korean writings about the king and Thai manuscripts about cats. It then follows the Siamese cat from Bangkok to Britain and America. Cats in ancient Egypt, at the Indian courts and in European royal portraits are covered in our article on royal cats in history. This page is part of our guide to royal pets in history.

Cats at the Heian court of Japan

Cats reached Japan long before its emperors wrote about them. Iwazaki Eiji, a veterinary scientist and cat folklore researcher interviewed by Nippon.com, says Japanese house cats were once thought to have arrived by the Silk Road in the Nara period (710 to 794) or the early Heian period. In 2011, bones from the Karakami ruins on Iki island, in Nagasaki Prefecture, were identified as a domestic cat, Japan's oldest. The ruins date from the Yayoi period, 300 BCE to 300 CE.

Emperor Uda's black cat

Emperor Uda kept a diary in variant Chinese, a mixed Sino-Japanese form of writing. Most of it is lost. In 1992, Judith Rabinovitch of the University of Montana and Akira Minegishi of Yokohama National University translated an entry from the first year of the Kanpyō era, which Uda headed "For the Love of a Cat".

Uda begins by saying where the cat came from. Minamoto no Suguru, the Junior Assistant Governor-General of Dazaifu, gave it to Uda's father, the former emperor Kōkō, when Suguru came back to the capital at the end of his term. Kōkō enjoyed the cat for several days and then gave it to his son. Iwazaki Eiji says Uda was seventeen at the time.

Uda then describes the cat with care:

• Colour. Other cats are a light black, he writes, but this one is dark black, like a crow.
• Size. It is a foot and a half long and six inches high. Curled up, it looks as small as a black millet berry; stretched out, it is long, like a drawn bow.
• Movement. It walks without a sound, and Uda compares it to a black dragon above the clouds.
• Work. It catches mice at night better than other cats.

Uda had cared for the cat for five years when he wrote the entry, and gave it milk gruel every morning. He says he took such care of it because his father had given it to him. He once told the cat that it held the forces of yin and yang, the two balancing forces of Chinese thought. The cat, he wrote, sighed, raised its head and stared at his face, as if too full of feeling to answer.

A cat with a court rank

Later, Sei Shōnagon, a lady-in-waiting to the Empress, recorded a palace cat in her Pillow Book. Iwazaki Eiji says this was the cat of Emperor Ichijō, who was known for his love of cats. In the 1930 English translation by Nobuko Kobayashi, the cat "was lately ennobled and therefore respectfully addressed by all as Myobu-no-Omoto". The original Japanese text, which the University of Virginia Library publishes online, gives the name as 命婦のおもと (Myōbu no Omoto).

The best-known passage is about the cat and a dog. One day the cat lay asleep in the sun on the edge of the veranda. Her attendant wanted her to come inside, and called as a joke for the palace dog, Okinamaru, to bite her. The dog believed she meant it and ran at the cat. She fled behind the screen where the Emperor was eating breakfast, and he held her to his chest. The Emperor ordered the dog beaten and sent into exile on Dog Island. He said the attendant could not be trusted and must be changed.

Okinamaru had been a court favourite. On 3 March, the book says, an official had decorated him with willow wreaths and peach blossoms and let him walk in the palace garden. A few days after his exile the court heard a dog being beaten. That evening a shabby, trembling dog came in, and nobody could agree whether it was Okinamaru. The next morning Sei Shōnagon said to herself that she grieved for Okinamaru's death, and the dog began to tremble and cry. It was him. The Emperor came to see, said that a dog has a beautiful nature, and later forgave Okinamaru, who stayed in the palace.

King Sukjong's golden cat in Joseon Korea

King Sukjong reigned in Korea from 1674 to 1720, during the Joseon dynasty. The Korea Heritage Service, the Korean government's heritage agency, calls him the greatest cat lover of the Joseon royal family. It says several writings record his love of cats, among them Yi Ha-gon's Dutacho and Yi Ik's Seongho Saseol. The most detailed is a poem, the Geummyoga, or "Song of the Golden Cat", in the collected works of the writer Kim Si-min.

The Korea Heritage Service sums up the poem and its preface:

• The king loved a palace cat and named it Geummyo, "golden cat". It was said to be golden, and the agency thinks it was a yellowish cat, of the kind Koreans now nickname a "cheese cat".
• It was the only creature in the palace allowed to eat close to the king, and on cold nights it slept beside the king's seat.
• One day palace staff accused it of stealing meat meant for the king, and drove it out.
• When Sukjong died, the cat refused to eat and cried for three days. Queen Dowager Inwon took pity on it and brought it back to the palace, but it still would not eat.
• After crying for dozens of days, it was found dead, thin to the bone, on the steps of the hall where the king's coffin lay.
• On the queen dowager's order, the cat was wrapped in silk and buried beside the road to Myeongneung, the king's tomb.

Korea.net, the government's English news site, gives the cat's name as Geumson. It says Sukjong was buried at Myeongneung in 1720, next to Queen Inhyeon, who had been buried there in 1701. Myeongneung is part of Seooreung, "five tombs in the west", in Goyang, Gyeonggi Province, where Queen Inwon also lies. Today a night tour of Seooreung uses a cat character inspired by Sukjong's cat.

Cats at the Siamese court

The Cat-Book Poems

In Siam, cats had their own manuscripts. The Tamra Maew, which English writers call the Cat-Book Poems or Thai Cat Poems, describes types of cat in verse, each with a painting. Jana Igunma, a curator at the British Library, wrote in 2013 that the treatise told readers certain cats could bring good luck, prosperity, rank or health to their owners. One example is a white cat with nine black spots and green eyes, which was said to bring high social status.

The British Library holds two copies. Or.16797, which Igunma described as a new acquisition in 2013, is a folding book of 12 leaves that open from top to bottom, with 23 watercolour paintings, made in central Thailand in the 19th century. Or.16008, already in the collection, has drawings in white chalk on blackened paper. Igunma says the manuscript names no author or painter.

The date of the poems is uncertain, and the sources give different answers:

The Cat Fanciers' Association (CFA) says on its Korat page that the manuscript shows 17 good-luck cats, and that the Korat was the best known of them. The CFA's 2000 profile says the poems describe a white cat with black ears, face, paws and tail, called Maew Kaew or Wichien Maat, and the GCCF names the Wichien Maat as the old Thai breed behind the Siamese. The poems reached English readers in a 1998 translation by Martin Clutterbuck.

Were Siamese cats royal cats?

Here the sources disagree. Igunma writes that "the breeding of the most famous Siamese cats, for example the Wichienmat, was reserved for the royal family alone". The CFA's 2000 profile says the earliest English books called the breed both Siamese and "The Royal Cat of Siam", because the first people who brought the cats west claimed they were bred under royal protection. The profile adds that in recent years many have treated these stories as more legend than fact. Its author, Betty White, says the early writers held to their claims so firmly that this suggests they were true.

A 2025 paper in the Wisdom Journal of Humanities and Social Science goes further. It says Thai cats first reached the West in the 19th century through diplomatic exchanges by the Thai monarchy, and that in 1901 the Thai government issued a statement that there was no "Royal Cat of Siam" and no breed kept specially in the palace. The Public Domain Review writes that King Chulalongkorn, Rama V, "reportedly" liked to give Wichien Maat cats as diplomatic gifts.

How Siamese cats reached the West

Two of the earliest recorded Siamese cats in the West came through foreign consuls in Bangkok.

Siam's life at the White House was short. The U.S. National Archives says she fell ill nine months after she arrived. The President's doctor tried to feed her back to health with fish, chicken, duck, cream and oysters, but she died. Her body went to the Department of Agriculture to be preserved, and was then lost. The Hayes family's cat was the first Siamese in the United States, and the CFA says a Siamese first won Best Cat in Show in 1907.

In Britain, the GCCF says all three of Pho and Mia's kittens died shortly after the 1885 show. The CFA says Siamese cats appear in the stud books of America's Beresford Cat Club in 1900.

At the Chinese court in 1903, the American painter Katharine Carl found that the Empress Dowager Cixi disliked cats, and that the eunuchs who kept them hid them from her. Her dogs are on our page on the Pekingese and the Chinese emperors. For much older royal cats, see our page on cats in ancient Egypt.

A court cat in a royal portrait

In these records, a Japanese emperor's cat received a court title and a Korean king's cat a silk burial. The cover of this page shows a Siamese cat from our studio examples in the Chola Warrior style, in gold armour and a tall gold crown, holding a sword and a spear in front of a temple tower. Any of the 15 styles can be chosen for a cat, from the Indian styles such as Mughal Emperor and Maharani to the European ones such as Regency Era. The gallery shows finished cat portraits, and the portrait studio takes one clear photo of up to 5 MB. Our pet photo guide explains how to take it.