Here’s another scan from the Young Companion (Liangyou 良友) illustrated magazine, issue no. 102 (1935), pages 22-23. A few Chinese hunters are profiled, mostly Mr. Hsu Tsiu-min [Xu Junmin 徐俊民]. A certain Mr. Li Zizhong [李自重], Mr. Huang Qiang [黃強], and Mr. Xie Wei [謝偉] are also briefly mentioned. These hunters are noteworthy because they’re conspicuously engaged in Western style sport hunting, complete with guns, dogs, and local laborers to help haul their catch. Though they are not the first hunters to be featured in The Young Companion, this two-paged spread is pretty significant in comparison to previous, brief mentions of “celebrity cosmopolitans.”
The following is a transcription of the bilingual article, “Carry on, hunters!” Unfortunately, this scan of a reproduction edition isn’t as clean as I’d like, so I was unable to transcribe everything. I’ll fill in what I can next time I return to the library.
I’m not very confident on the breed IDs here, so I welcome your guesses. They look mostly like setters to me. Obviously, they are not Chinese dogs. But in this context, the foreign provenance of these gun dogs is more about fashion, the hunter’s constructed self-image, and a symbolic display of his cultural capital. It wouldn’t matter if a native dog could do the hunting he wanted; none of these men would have wanted it, even if they could believe it.
重二百十七餘磅之山豬，其牙如叉，身長七尺，圓經三尺，性極兇狠，獵者如不一擊既斃之，為其所衝面而來，反被所害。旁立者為獵者李自重氏。
[This section was not translated into English: "This boar weighs over 217 pounds, teeth like prongs, body seven feet long, girth three feet, extremely fierce. If the hunters had not immediately gunned him down, they would have been charged and hurt instead. At the side stands the hunter Mr. Li Zizhong.]
徐氏及其獵犬在中途小憩。
Mr. Hsu and his dogs having a few minutes’ rest during the hunting expedition.
照獵者言，獵時如得三五友同往，偶有獸物在前，圍面攻之，其效靈驗，此圖為李自重氏與黃強，謝偉氏等行獵時合力追擊而此兇猛之山豬後所攝。
The result of a well devised strategem.
[Chinese text goes into detail about how the group all surrounded and charged the wild boar.]
？母犬為徐氏所畜？，？產十二子，圖為？犬子爭食母奶之情形。
The mother hound and its dozen puppies.
山雞產於江浙？甚多，每屆？？，農氏捕之售於市，可得善價，圖為徐俊民所獵得之山雞。
Pheasants, another part of Mr. Hsu’s trophy.
[Chinese text explains that these are plentiful game that the locals also catch to sell for good prices at the market.]
江浙產？鹿甚多，但性？狡猾，不易獲得，此為徐氏一天所得之成績。
Good enough for a day’s toil. Mr. Hsu and his well earned trophy, four Chekiang deer which he shot in a day.
[Chinese text emphasizes that though this deer is particularly abundant, they are very "crafty" and so not easy to catch -- thereby reassuring readers of the hunter's skill. I need to check the original to see what kind of deer this was, as the character here is unclear.]
徐氏所養之獵犬之一之頭部姿勢，聞此犬之外祖為某美國犬，價值美金一萬元。
The hound of great speed and endurance, an indispensible servant of the [illegible].
[Of course, I'm interested in what kind of dog this was and where he came from. The Chinese text says the dog comes from American pedigrees, valued at $10,000 American dollars.]
獵者之收穫，每出意外，此為極難得之金錢豹。
A pair of young leopards, a very rare game in Chekiang.
打獵時飛禽走獸各有個？之獵槍，此為各種獵槍之展覽。
Sporting guns with different calibres and barrels for different kinds of games.
為使利攜帶起見， 獵槍？隨時分部折開於皮箱內。
The case when containing the different parts of the sporting gun which can easily be put together.
有名於打獵界之徐俊民氏對於獵狩，有多年之經驗，每於公餘之暇，攜其自家之外國獵犬至各山野行獵，其於鎗法，尤為精到，嘗執上海射鎗會最高［靶］綠，圖為其瞰槍時之正面姿勢。
Mr. Hsu Tsiu-min, noted amateur hunter posing to show the correct way to hold the gun while taking aims.
[Chinese text elaborates a little more on what makes Mr. Hsu so noteworthy -- his years of experience, devoting every holiday to a hunting expedition, breeding his own dogs, his markmanship, his masterful poise, which is amply highlighted by this photo spread.]
未舉槍瞄？時？槍應有之姿勢。
Hold the gun this way while you are proceeding in search of games.
舉槍待發之側面姿勢。
Ready to fire.
[Emphasis on the gun as intricate machinery, a very precise technological apparatus that takes more than mere access (i.e., purchase) to operate -- one must be trained and disciplined to wield it, as this article elaborates by showing all the different parts and body positions.]
Thanks for sharing this article with us.
There’s more where that came from. Came across another article about Shanghaiese hunters and their Pointers… will snag it and bring it out later, all in good time.
I’m fascinated by the international traffic of breeds.
Part of the reason why I am intrigued is there are cynologists who actually believe Chinese dogs are kept pure, free of foreign blood. For awhile I was highly skeptical because it was well-documented in German journals there were European-influenced street-dogs in Japan composed of dogs brought by the Dutch mercenaries. China and other Asian kingdoms courted a lot of traders throughout the Spice Ages. Articles like these disprove the notion that Chinese dogs are completely isolated from imported dogs.
These believers say this in response to Boykos`s study on African village dogs which showed African dogs are just as genetically diverse as Southeast Asian dogs to defend the Asian origin domestication theory.
Truth is, we will not find the origin of dogs using modern samples. The wolf is not extinct, movement of dogs is very fluid, they can still interbreed with Golden Jackals, Ethiopian Wolf and coyotes. We can piece things together like a jig-saw puzzle, but there will never be a definitive paper which says: “This is it. Everyone, pack up and go home. We have done our job.”
So, I appreciate seeing articles like this.
Dutch merchants. Not mercenaries. My apologies.
My impulse is to scrutinize the researchers behind such claims, for starters… given that there has historically been a strong nationalistic motive to claims of “purity” for humans and canines alike. There are a lot of interesting contemporary Chinese dog-breeding projects that don’t seem to participate in that discourse of “purity” either. Take the case of the Kunming dogs, developed in the ethnically diverse SW border regions of China. I need to dig into the materials some more, but one thing I noticed is that the breeders there have no qualms about acknowledging that there’s a lot of Malinois, GSD, and other European sheepdog lines combined with local dogs to create their vision of a hardy, athletic, and localized working breed.
One picture popped out in the Pointer article I mentioned above — there’s at least one dog that has an odd shaped head, like it was possibly crossed with a local dog. I didn’t scan or read that article yet, but it would be really exciting to find out if any sports hunters from these much more centralized areas (i.e., Zhejiang, NOT Mongolia or Yunnan or Tibet or other hinterlands) were engaged in cross-breeding programs. And of course, if the foreign dogs were there (and indeed they were), the opportunities for interaction with native dogs just becomes that much higher.
By coincidence, after another chance encounter with a Taiwan dog, I got to thinking about Dutch Shepherds from the 1600s and whether or not we can still measure their contribution to the current Formosan Mountain Dog gene pool. Sounds like that’s not possible. Brindle patterns, in particular, are such a striking and tantalizing visual marker… But the materials that I know how to close read are visual and textual, not genetic.