Mouse vs Cat in Chinese Literature Read online

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  that were put up in teahouses. This only came to an end after the prefect

  had implored [for the cancellation of the search order] through a favorite

  concubine.62

  The lion cat mentioned in the above anecdote was an ornamental long-

  haired breed on which Wu Zimu provides the following information in his

  Mil et­Dream Records (Mengliang lu), a memoir of Hangzhou as capital of the Southern Song: “Cats: people in the capital (Hangzhou) keep them to

  catch mice. But there are also long-haired, white-and-yellow-colored ones

  that are called lion cats. These cannot catch mice, but because of their beautiful looks they are often kept by the nobility, high officials, and other members of the bureaucracy, by whom they are very much pampered.”63 The lion cats

  have lost nothing of their privileged status in modern China.64

  Following their entry into poetry, domestic cats (often lion cats) also

  became a subject in traditional Chinese painting during the Song dynasty.65

  As in poetry, the cats and kittens are more often portrayed while playfully chasing butterflies than seriously catching mice.66 Paintings (and later also prints) of cats and butterflies had a clear function, as the word for “cat” ( mao) was homophonous with the word for “eighty years of age” ( mao) and the word for “butterfly” ( die) with the word for “septuagenarian” ( die), which made such images a fitting present for elderly gentlemen, wishing them a happy old age. These paintings in due time also came to inspire poets, as we saw above from the quatrain by Liu Ji. Cats holding a mouse between their jaws, we may assume, were intended to scare rodents away, and prints showing a cat with

  a mouse between its teeth were known as “silkworm cats” because when the

  worms were spinning their cocoons the prints were put up outside the silk-

  worm sheds as a warning to rodents and outsiders not to enter.67 Huang Han

  in his Garden of Cats discusses the paintings of a certain cat painter that in themselves were enough to kill mice and rats.

  After all, the primary function of cats remained catching mice and rats.

  From the Tang we have a number of documents that protest against the clas-

  sification of cats and rats suckling together as a positive sign, because it is the heaven-set nature of cats to kill rodents.68 When in 778 the military governor Zhu Ci reported a cat that suckled both kittens and rats as a propitious omen and the caring animal was received by the court with great honor, the official Cui Youfu (721–780) protested in the following terms:

  When Heaven gives birth to the ten thousand creatures, they all have their

  own nature, whether fierce or soft. Basing himself on these different natures, This content downloaded from 129.174.21.5 on Wed, 17 Jul 2019 13:04:29 UTC

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  the Sage provides instructions and sets rules. According to the Rites one welcomes the cat because it eats the rodents in the fields. So it is recorded in the statutes on sacrifices that a cat eats rodents. Minimal as it may be,

  [this contribution] has to be noted because the cat can remove pests and

  benefit humankind. Now, if this cat does not eat rats, it may be humane but acts counter to its nature. . . . If this cat that is fed by us does not fulfill its duty, how is its behavior different from judicial officers who cannot fight evil and border officials who lack diligence in warding off enemies? According to the three grounds listed in the Norms of the Ministry of Rites for classifying an event as a lucky omen, there is no item for a cat that does not eat mice.

  Therefore it would be against all reason to call this a blessing. . . . If we judge this on the basis of the Treatise on the Five Elements of Liu Xiang, orders have to be given, I fear, to the Censorate to investigate corrupt officials, while the border regions have to be put on alert so they will step up their patrols.

  Under those conditions the cat will make its contribution and the rodents

  will bring no harm.69

  The wisdom of Cui Youfu’s words was confirmed by the fact that Zhu Ci later rebelled.

  If some cats, as we will see below, spectacularly failed in their duties, our sources also provide us with stories of brutal mousers:

  Zhu Zhang, the provincial administration commissioner for Fujian, hailed

  from Jiaozhi (northern Vietnam) but lived in Suzhou. In the first year of the Jingtai reign period (1450–1466) he was demoted to the position of post station master at Zhuanglang in Shaanxi. One day, when an ambassador from

  the western barbarians was on his way to present a cat as tribute, he passed by the station and Zhang hosted him. Through an interpreter he asked, “What is so exceptional in this cat that it is presented?” The ambassador replied in writing, “If you want to know how exceptional it is, try it out tonight.” The cat was placed in an iron cage, and in a double iron cage it was placed in an empty room. When they got up the next morning to have a look, several tens

  of rats were lying around the cage, all dead. The ambassador said, “Wherever this cat is, the rats from miles around will all come, lie down, and die. It must be the king of cats.”70

  In the Song and later, the literati owners of cats first of all wanted them to protect their books. This may reflect the sudden growth of the number

  and size of private libraries following the invention and widespread use of This content downloaded from 129.174.21.5 on Wed, 17 Jul 2019 13:04:29 UTC

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  printing. From the desire to find a good mouser when acquiring a cat emerged a special body of literature on judging cats on the basis of their external characteristics, handbooks on cat physiognomy ( xiangmao jing).71 For easy memorization, some of these handbooks were composed in verse. According

  to the Yuan-dynasty author Yu Zongben, the best mousers are the animals

  that meet the following criteria:

  The cats that come with a short body are by far the best;

  The eyes should be of gold or silver and the tail be long.

  A face that shows a tiger’s might, and then a piercing voice,

  So mice and rats on hearing it will promptly disappear.72

  Potential buyers are acquainted with a number of negative indications in

  the following poem:

  With showing nails it overturns your pots,

  With a long waist it runs around the house;

  With a long face it kills off all your chicks,

  With a large tail it is as lazy as a snake.73

  Further advice concerned the days for buying a cat and bringing it into

  one’s home. There also were specific instructions on how to take the cat from its original home to its new dwelling to make sure it would be unable to make its way back.

  But despite such practical advice, many owners were eventually deeply

  disappointed by the performance of their new possession, and they voiced

  their frustration with great literary flourish.74 One complaint was that the cats that were too lazy to catch mice and rats were quite willing to chase

  butterflies and kill songbirds—and even might murder the owner’s prized

  parrot! In the thirteenth century the well-known poet Liu Kezhuang (1187–

  1269) wrote, for instance, a long piece titled An Indictment against My Cat (Jiemao fu) in which he first describes his high hopes on acquiring a cat that has been hig
hly recommended by all specialists, next details his disappointment when the animal fails to exterminate the rodents in his house but finds a way to kill his pet parrot, and concludes by expressing his desire to kill the beast—unless it will use this last chance to improve its performance!

  Alas, because it is your job to catch rats,

  Your features are fierce, and your whiskers heroic.

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  But those you are expected to catch,

  Those you most diligently cherish and protect,

  While those you are not expected to catch,

  Those you chase and kill, jumping for joy.

  I would like to execute you,

  But I cannot bring myself to do so—

  If you still have some understanding,

  You must quickly change your plans.

  If

  not,

  There must in this world be some other cricket-snatcher

  That will live up to its responsibility to catch those rats!75

  Several centuries later Zhu Heling (1606–1683) tells us that he did not stop at threats but took more drastic measures when his cat failed him:

  On Cats

  My house is persistently plagued by rats, and the books in my collection

  always suffer damage from their chewing and nibbling. Because we had no

  cat, I bought one. It was of a most imposing size and had extremely sharp

  claws and fangs. When it first arrived, the rats stayed in their holes with bated breath, so I was quite happy at the thought that the problem of the

  rats would be finished. But after a month or so, the problem was the same

  as before, and throughout the night I heard their rasping sounds. When I,

  amazed, looked into the situation, I found that the cat and the rats were

  sleeping and living together as if in perfect harmony. When I wondered why, it turned out that the cat was greedy by nature and loved to eat its fill on fish and meat. It would steal and eat whatever it saw was stocked in the kitchen.

  When the rats discovered this state of affairs they collected in advance whatever the cat liked to eat in order to give it to the cat. The cat allowed them to do so and was filled with gratitude, and thereupon let them do whatever

  they wanted to do. First the rats feared the cat because of its size, but then they befriended the cat and became close to it because they fed it what it

  liked to eat. They benefited from the cat and showed less and less restraint when coming and going and being a pest.

  I heaved a sigh and said, “How extreme is the poison of greed! If the cat

  would not steal anything, how would the rats dare feed it? How could the cat stop the rats from stealing if it was itself the first to steal? My original intention in keeping this cat was that it would catch the rats, but now it actually brings on the rats, and even makes common cause with them. This means it

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  is the champion of the rats! Why don’t I do away with this champion of the

  rats? Then the depredations of the rats may perhaps diminish somewhat.”

  I thereupon ordered the boy to shackle its neck, tie up its legs, and after a sound beating drown it in a crossroad latrine.76

  From a century later we have yet another account of a cat’s dereliction of

  duty by Shen Qifeng (1741–?):

  “Summons against the Cat”

  My student Huang Zhijun loves to study. When he has his maps on his left

  and his books on his right he feels like a king. He keeps a cat in order to protect his books. If you see its colors, it is striped like a tiger, and everyone would consider it a magnificent beast. He puts it next to the book shelves, where it innocently sleeps all through the day, loudly purring, as if it is uttering the name of the Buddha. Someone said, “This is a cat that recites the name of the Buddha,” so he called it Buddha’s Slave.

  When they first saw Buddha’s Slave in the room, the mice and the rats

  still would hide their traces to some extent. But when later one of them lost its footing while jumping on the beams and fell flat-out on the floor, Buddha’s Slave comforted it repeatedly and led it away. From that time on, these rodents showed no fear at all and surrounded it on all sides in large numbers.

  One day they even stepped on its shoulders and climbed on its back and even went so far as to bite its nose—blood oozed out without end. Huang was

  about to ask for some medicine to cure this, when I happened to drop by. I

  chided him, saying, “One keeps a cat for the purpose of catching mice. If it cannot exterminate them, it neglects its function; if it is even bitten by them, it loses its dignity. You should whip it and punish it. What is the point of any medicine?” I ordered him to compose a declaration of war for a campaign

  against the animal, “and I will edit it.”77

  The student obediently composed a formal declaration of war against the

  cat, with all due rhetorical flourishes as required by the genre. Fortunately, there were also owners who took a more philosophical attitude toward their

  cat’s laziness, as we learn from the following poem by Huang Zhijun’s con-

  temporary Zhuang Yuanxie (d. 1824):

  Our Lazy Cat

  In vain we feed a little cat here in our mountain home:

  It feels ashamed, by nature lazy, it must guard our place.

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  It keeps the fast, throughout the night, making a purring sound;

  When days are cold it loves the stove while snoring in its sleep.

  Now flower shadows fill the ground, it chases butterflies,

  And from the brook before the gate it gets some fish as food.

  It’s a good thing the rats think us too poor to come and visit—

  But if they did, we’d have no one who would protect our books.78

  But one had to be a Buddhist monk to deem it a virtue in a cat not to catch mice:

  Master Bin, a monk of the Wanshou [Monastery], was once entertaining a

  guest. When his cat sat down next to him, he said to his guest, “People say that a rooster displays the five virtues, but so does this cat. When it sees a mouse, it will not catch it: this displays love. When a mouse steals its food, it will cede it: this displays righteousness. When guests arrive and food is set out, it will appear: this displays ritual. When I hide food in the best way possible, it will still be able to steal it and eat it: this displays wisdom. Each year on the first day of winter it will enter the stove: this displays reliability.”79

  Master Bin’s statement called forth the following scathing comments by

  Shen Qifeng at the end of his “Summons against the Cat” quoted above:

  Once upon a time, Master Bin of the Wanshou Monastery deemed his cat’s

  refusal to catch a mouse on seeing it a display of love. All called this a bizarre pronouncement, but they did not realize that this is indeed the method of

  the school of the Buddha. But once a student of Confucianism becomes an

  official, his main task is the eradication of evil and the support of goodness.

  [If he would act like this cat] he would live on the salary from his lord only and buy himse
lf an idle fame, he would feed the scoundrels in town and

  harm the people! Someone like Buddha’s Slave will definitely be pardoned

  by the Buddhists but will definitely be executed by the law of the land!80

  Demonic Cats

  In ancient Egypt cats were revered as holy animals, but in medieval Europe

  (and also later) cats, in particular black cats, for many centuries had an evil reputation as associates of the devil and the mounts of witches.81 Such beliefs often made the animal the butt of cruel pranks. In China, as we have seen,

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  devotion was more popular among the Tibetans than among the Chinese.

  At the end of the nineteenth century, the Dutch sinologist J. J. M. de Groot already commented on the near-total absence of cats in Chinese demonology

  in his encyclopedic survey of Chinese religion when he wrote, “Tales about

  cat-demons are scarce in the literature, so that it is tolerably evident that this class of evil beings never occupied a pre-eminent place in its superstition.”82

  He proceeded to discuss a rare case of cat worship of the late sixth century from northern China, which is well known because this use of black magic

  took place in the highest circles of the Sui dynasty (581–618) and because

  the historical sources have preserved in great detail the confession of one of the participants (a half brother of the dynasty’s founding emperor’s wife).

  This cat worship, without any connection to Buddhism, was very much the

  domain of women, who used it to cast a spell on their enemies and obtain

  their riches. The cult has recently been studied in considerable detail, but whether it was directed primarily toward domestic cats or wildcats is not

  clear to me.83 The cult, insofar as we can reconstruct it, shows great similarity to the cult of foxes and other comparable animals in northern China in late-imperial times.84 References to a cat cult are very rare from the intervening period, but from late-imperial times we have one account of a cat-ghost cult as practiced in eighteenth-century Gansu in the Records of Limited Information (Zhiwen lu) by Yongne Jushi (ca. 1843), who himself draws attention to the similarity of this cult to the cat cult of more than a millennium earlier.