Whence
Siamese cat
Animal

Where does Siamese cat come from?

Siamese cats come from Thailand, called Siam until 1939. Pale cats with dark points are painted in old Thai manuscripts, and in the late 1800s, shipped from Bangkok, they became one of the first distinctly recognised cat breeds.

Pictured in the Cat-Book Poems

The pointed cat appears in the Tamra Maew, or Cat-Book Poems: painted manuscripts that picture cats thought to bring good luck and describe them in Thai verse. The genre is believed to go back to the Ayutthaya kingdom (1351–1767), but the surviving copies date from after the Burmese sacked its capital in 1767, most of them from the 19th century. Most versions list seventeen lucky cats. The pointed one is the wichianmat, from which the Siamese breed was later developed.

From Bangkok to the cat shows

In 1878 the American consul in Bangkok sent a cat named Siam to the White House as a gift for Lucy Hayes, wife of President Rutherford B. Hayes: the first documented Siamese to reach the United States. In 1884 Edward Blencowe Gould, a British diplomat in Bangkok, brought a breeding pair, Pho and Mia, home for his sister, and in 1885 they were shown with three kittens at London's Crystal Palace. British fanciers called the first imports the 'Royal Cat of Siam', though research has found no evidence of an organised royal breeding programme in Siam.

Points that follow the cold

The dark points come from a form of partial albinism. A mutation makes tyrosinase, an enzyme that produces the pigment melanin, sensitive to heat: it fails at normal body temperature but works in skin cooler than about 33 °C. So the coolest parts, the face, ears, paws and tail, turn dark. Siamese kittens are born cream to white and develop their points in the first months, and adults in warm climates tend to have lighter coats than those in cool ones.

Sources: en.wikipedia.org › Siamese cat ↗ · en.wikipedia.org › Treatise on Cats ↗ · cfa.org ↗ · publicdomainreview.org ↗ · whitehousehistory.org ↗

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