The Emperor's So-Called Cats and the Manjurist Bat-Signal
Spoiler: The Qianlong Emperor's cats are (probably) fakety fake-fake-fake.
You may have seen an image going around that purports to show the Qianlong Emperor’s favorite cats as painted by Ignatius Sichelbart 艾啓蒙 (1708-1780), a Bohemian Jesuit — I enjoy typing those words together — who resided at the Qing court. If you haven’t seen it, you should fix that! It probably isn’t real, but it’s still pretty great:
I first heard about these from Yao Lin 林垚 just after I published “The Naming of Cats,” and had been meaning to write something about them. This went the way of all vague intentions until recently, when Wendy Xu reminded me of the paintings.
Just look at these little dudes! Look at all the personcatality on display! Look at their little names! Tag yourself — I’m “The Sky As Reflected In Water” 涵虛奴, but it was hard to choose and I’m already having second thoughts.
苓香狸 “Fragrance of the Dried Sclerotia of a Parasitic Wood-Decay Fungus Commonly Used in Chinese Medicine or Actually Probably Licorice Root in This Context Now That I Think About It” was clearly also a very good boy:
And I wouldn’t want to cast aspersions on “Mr. Marvelous Stillness” 妙靜狸, who looks like he’s on a quest for treats that’s about to include a big stretch and a friendly headbutt. All the other cats in these pictures look like they’re posing, but my man Marvelpuss Stillnyaass has been caught in the act:
And those names! On the left, from the top down, you’ve got 舞蒼 Dancing Through the Sky, 飛睇 Flitty Eyes, 苓香 Licorice, 涵虚 Reflected Sky, and 妙静 Marvelous Stillness. I for one would die to defend Flitty Eyes and his grumpy Wilford Brimley-looking little face.
On the right, the other five alleged cats — I’m setting something up here; your Spidey-sense should be tingling; please hold off on sharing the pictures until you’ve read to the end — are 清寧 Pure Tranquility, 仁照 The Compassionate Contemplator, 普福 Universal Good Fortune, and 采芳, The Flower-Plucker.
Last, and largest, there’s 翻雪 Snowplow, who is neither street-wise nor book-smart and would make a very poor general.
I’m pleased to report that according to Andrew West, Snowplow’s Manchu name, ᠠᡳᠶᠠᡳ ᠠᠮᠪᠠ ᠨᡳ aiyai amba ni, appears to mean something like “Yow, she chomk.” I take no pleasure at all in reporting that this is where the wheels start coming off of the Emperor’s cats.
I want to believe.
Unfortunately, there isn’t much evidence for these paintings existing in the first place.
Ignatius Sichelbart really did exist, and really was one of the Jesuits who painted at the Qing court, alongside the better-known Giuseppe Castiglione 郎世寧; he even produced paintings of the Qianlong Emperor’s favorite hunting hounds. The cat portraits look more or less like (my impression of) Castiglione’s style, a fusion of European and Chinese techniques that one very talented Chinese painter friend finds absolutely enraging, but less, to my untrained eye, like Sichelbart’s paintings of the hounds — though some of that could be the lack of a background in the cat portraits, and more of it could just be me not knowing anything.
I can find posts about the cat portraits going back at least as far as 2018, but they don’t seem to be mentioned in any non-post, non-clickbait sources, and the images are always the same, plus or minus watermarks, rather than the mixture of slightly different lighting conditions, angles, and scan qualities you’d see if these were in a museum collection somewhere. The emperor’s cats aren’t in the Palace Museum’s catalogue, or the other Palace Museum’s catalogue, or anybody else’s catalogue as far as I can tell. This sets off more alarm bells — there should be some mention of them somewhere, surely — but isn’t decisive: I know nothing about art or art history, haven’t got institutional access to grown-up databases, and could very well be missing something obvious.
Finding things about the portraits has been a bust so far, but maybe we’ll get better mileage out of what’s in them, or what isn’t: Each portrait is signed “Respectfully painted by yr. servant Ai Qimeng” (臣艾啓蒙恭繪), just like the ones in the definitely-real “Ten Fine Hounds” album — but Sichelbart’s seals, visible in the album, aren’t on any of the cat paintings. Still not decisive: the seals on the hound paintings say the same thing as his signature; maybe he felt they were redundant. But it’s definitely weird that the Qianlong Emperor’s seals aren’t on any of these paintings, because that man loved stamping his name on things.
The cats sure do look real, though, don’t they? They look like real cats, in real poses, with believable expressions of affably irritated puzzlement at being made to sit still, and at least some of them — not poor Snowplow — really do possess the authentic hauteur of imperial moggies, though I’m not sure how one would go about distinguishing this from the attitude of your average garbage cat. There might even be genuine palace cats somewhere in the paintings’ backstory: Joel Martinsen notes that at least one of the cats supposedly belonging to the Qianlong Emperor — my guy Marvelpuss — seems to have been copied from a Southern Song-dynasty painting of a kitten with a dragonfly attributed to Li Di 李迪 (fl. 13th c.), now in the collection of the Ōsaka City Museum of Fine Arts.
I also found an album with the nine other cat portraits (as well as four additional ones) available in the Xiling Yinshe auction house’s 2009 Spring auction, under the listing “Anonymous - Cat Portraits” (佚名 - 狸奴影), with the Chinese and Manchu names but without Sichelbart’s signature, so all things considered this isn’t looking great.
But I want to believe, and I bet you do too, and that’s where the Bat-Signal of the title comes in.
So far, it looks to me as if all of the evidence points to these paintings being internet fakes, or maybe original images that someone else decided to improve by identifying them as the work of a Bohemian Jesuit painting for the cat-loving emperor of a conquest dynasty.1 (This is relatable: if I were the Son of Heaven, I’d rope some Jesuits into painting my cats too, once they got done translating Euclid and reforming the calendar.)
But it wouldn’t hurt to get more eyes on the cats’ Manchu names, which could probably decide this thing once and for all. According to Andrew West, Snowplow’s is the only Manchu name analyzable as having any meaning: The other names end with -aha (“[male] slave”), corresponding to 狸, or -ni (possibly short for ninuri, “cat?”), corresponding to 奴, but aren’t translations of the Chinese names and appear to be gibberish. Hence the Ashangga Singgeri-Signal.
Manjurists!
All those grammars, all that fiddly vowel harmony, all the screwing around with different initial/medial/final letter forms — it’s all been leading up to this. You have spent long, thankless years acquiring knowledge, and finally somebody is asking for it, and it doesn’t have any bearing on 21st-century state borders for a change so you’re probably even safe to speak!
How did the Manchus name their cats? Were the names usually meaningful, as in aiyai amba ni / Aiya, Big Kit[ty], or would “[meaningless syllables]-boy/-girl” have been more common?
Your question for the week is: Were Manchu cats “Mungojerry” and “Griddlebone,” or were they “Marvelous Stillness” and “Reflected Sky?”
This sort of thing happens all the time, no malice necessary. There’s a commonly reposted “ancient Japanese painting” (from 2007, by Galina Zhiganova) of a woman cutting the sleeve of her kimono to avoid waking up a cat that’s sleeping on it, and no amount of fact-checking or correction will ever dislodge it from the Internet.
I don't mind that much that they are fake. Pretty much everything is fake nowadays. But they're still pretty cool pictures.
This is absolutely the cat's meow ( pun intended). Not only do I want to believe, but this falsity even makes me feel bad at the pathetic attempts I make to try to creatively name my cats. Excellent detective work