Shar-Pei Were Supposed to Outgrow Their Wrinkles.

Everyone says the shar pei's wrinkles were armour for dog fighting. The dog's own name says something else: shar pei means sand skin, and it refers to the coat. In Dali, the Chinese town the breed comes from, the traditional 'bone mouth' shar pei is wrinkled as a puppy and grows out of it. The heavily folded adult most people picture was selected in the West after 1973, and a 2011 genetics study found that the same stretch of DNA behind the folds is linked to the breed's own fever. This is the shar pei's skin read against the sources: the breed standards, a museum's Han dynasty figure, a breeder in Dali, the breed club's history and the genetics paper. CHAPTERS 0:00 Why the shar pei looks like this 0:44 Sand 1:25 A figure in a tomb 2:04 The fights in Dali 3:07 Bone mouth 4:02 Almost nothing left 4:47 Save the Chinese Shar Pei 5:27 Choosing the puppy 6:26 What the wrinkles are made of 7:48 Two rule books 8:41 Armour SOURCES FCI Standard No. 309, Shar Pei (1999): coat 'short, harsh and bristly... never trimmed'; utilization 'hunting- and watch-dog'; heavy folds on body and limbs are an eliminating fault. AKC Official Standard of the Chinese Shar-Pei (1998): loose skin 'superabundant in puppies', may be limited to head, neck and withers in the adult. Olsson M. et al. (2011), 'A Novel Unstable Duplication Upstream of HAS2 Predisposes to a Breed-Defining Skin Phenotype and a Periodic Fever Syndrome in Chinese Shar-Pei Dogs', PLoS Genetics 7(3): e1001332, doi:10.1371/journal.pgen.1001332. Chinese Shar-Pei Club of America, 'History of the Chinese Shar-Pei': 1966, 1970, Matgo Law's 1973 appeal, the club in 1974, AKC recognition in 1992. Guangzhou Daily, 13 February 2018 (reprinted by China News): the Dali account of dog fighting and the interview with breeder Chen Weixiang (bone mouth and meat mouth). Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields, 'seated shar pei dog', Eastern Han dynasty, about 100 CE, accession 1999.2A-B. WHAT IS NOT SETTLED The idea that the loose body skin was fighting armour is repeated widely. We found no primary source for it. The account we did find, from Dali, is about folds on the face and neck, and it is local memory, not documented history. Whether the Han figure is a shar pei cannot be proven from clay; the museum calls it one. Where we give our own reading, the video says so. Nothing in this video is veterinary advice. ARCHIVE Seated dog, Eastern Han dynasty, Indianapolis Museum of Art: photo by Sailko, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Olsson et al. 2011, Figure 1, 'The phenotypic spectrum of the Chinese Shar-Pei': CC BY 2.5. Traditional bone mouth Shar-Pei, 2007; bone mouth Shar-Pei with litter, 1995; Shar-Pei puppies, 1996: public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. All other images are AI-generated reconstructions, declared as altered or synthetic content. The history, the dates and the quotations are not. #sharpei #doghistory #dogdocumentary #chinesesharpei #dogbreeds