Secrets of the Cat_ Its Lore, Legend, and Lives - Barbara Holland [63]
The sacred cat of Burma is descended from a cat named Sinh the Oracle, who was white but with ears, tail, nose and paws “the color of earth.” Its eyes were yellow, but turned blue while it was defending the temple from Siamese invaders, after which all sacred temple cats had blue eyes. This is the long-haired, white-gloved Birman, though, proudly claimed by the Burmese, while what we call Burmese are said to be common in modern Thailand. The Thais say that any Siamese seen in their streets nowadays have been imported from the West, and that their cats are Korats, natives of the Korat province there and, though always rare, one of the oldest recorded breeds; they’re silver-blue with green or amber eyes. On the other hand, there’s a drawing of a seal-point Siamese in The Cat-Book Poems in the Bangkok Museum, and the book came out in 1350.
Jungle boundary lines between countries have never much bothered cats.
The story that arrived in the West with them was that they could be owned only by priests and royalty, and lived jealously guarded in the temples and palaces, and that to steal one was punishable by death. Early imports often had crossed eyes and kinked tails, attributed to watching over temple treasures, staring fixedly at them and wrapping their tails around them for safekeeping. They’re said to have attacked thieves. Perhaps they merely spoke, and frightened them off; perhaps they jumped onto their shoulders. Siamese have always liked shoulders. In a Victorian photograph of a pioneer Siamese collector, one of her overweight cats is draped awkwardly but contentedly over her shoulder. Siamese find it amusing to come quietly up behind you and spring from the ground to your shoulder or, failing that, your back, where they hang suspended from your clothes and flesh. Corvo gives a little cry of warning before he jumps; Morgan doesn’t. Once settled, they will ride happily around on you, purring with satisfaction and nipping your ear and jaw in the sharp Siamese way of saying “love.” Certainly this would disconcert a burglar, but the cats do it only to intimate friends.
Or maybe they tripped the temple thieves; tripping is another
Siamese trait. They enjoy pushing ahead of you on the stairs and then hunkering down on the bottom step to see if you will fall over them, the Siamese notion of a joke. Corvo in his wild youth used to trip cars; he lurked in the woods by the road until the car was almost level with him and then danced giddily across in front of it. After he finally succeeded, and lived to tell the tale, he quit.
Perhaps there’s nothing but public-relations hype behind the sacred-temple-cat, royalty-only story; at a thousand turn-of-the-century dollars per kitten, the least a buyer could expect was an exotic romance to go with it.
Whoever they were originally, our Siamese did come from Siam. The first pair arriving in England were brought from Bangkok in 1884 by a Mr. Owen Gould; he had been consul-general there, and they were a gift from the king. Their names were Pho and Mia and their kittens won prizes at the Crystal Palace Exhibition in 1885, the same year Miss Forestier-Walker brought in Susan and Tian O’Shian, and the French resident minister in Siam sent a pair to the Jardin des Plantes in Paris, which probably lacked the right emotional atmosphere. The kittens were proving tricky to raise, and enteritis losses were heavy.
In 1900 Mrs. Clinton Locke of Chicago registered Lockhaven Siam and Lockhaven Sally Ward, and the following year she signed up two chocolate points.
All the immigrants carried the genes for chocolate points, with its lighter body color, and the elegantly pale blue point; a blue point named Rhoda was registered in England in 1894. The recessive blue color is said to have been introduced by an all-blue jungle cat of Malaysia, a cross that was entirely the cat’s idea. Two seal points with