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Marble relief of dog in hunting, Sui period (581-619 AD), China
History of traditional Shar-pei as a "breed"
General history
AKC Dog Book introduced Shar-pei dating back to the Han dynasty (206 BC to 220 AD). It mention about "statues bearing a strong resemblance to the Shar-pei have been discovered and dated to this period".
This "Marble relief of a youth with his horse and dog" was created during the Roman period about 125 AD.
Shar-pei critique of above dog: Chamfa year, sickle tail, a wun fish body and a very short coat (horse coat).
Although this marble dog originated in Hadrian's Villa, Tivoli, unrelated to China, further investigation of similar marble tomb slab unearthed in China (see photo below) during the Sui period (581 to 619 AD) revealed astonishing similarity.
Enlarged image of the hunting dog see top of the page.
The marble slabs excavated from a tomb in Taiyuan, Shanxi Province, China (dated 592 AD) show scenes of hunting, and man and lion in combat.
These two marble slabs respectively found in the West and in the East revealed morphology of a hunting dog.
Introduction to Butterfly cookie (Woo dip sou) in China
 There is a descriptive saying for traditional Shar-Pei nose which is "butterfly nose". The word "butterfly" here basically refers to the name of a kind of cookie found in area around Guangzhou and the Pearl River Delta. To understand what it means, we must first look at what is a "butterfly cookie". It is clearly a western cookie rather than a Chinese one.
So the next question is when did the "Butterfly cookie" first imported into China and become well known among its people in Guangzhou? The answer lies in the geography of Guangzhou. Guangzhou is the oldest and the most busy trading port throughout the history in China. Like Venice in Italy, the city enjoyed its prime time as maritime trading port during the Mongolian occupation in the Yuan dynasty (1271-1368). But the trading during this time was mainly regional, vessels sailing along the coast reaching all the way into the Arabian world.
The real direct contact with the Western world on a maritime trading scale was actually around the middle of the18th century when " The Thirteen Hongs of Canton " began to take form in Guangzhou, many foreign traders; British, French, American, Dutch, Spanish, Swedish, Greek established "Factories" outside of Guangzhou. "Factories" means trading offices directly dealing with the Chinese Imperial Traders or "Hongs". Therefore, it can be inferred that the "Butterfly cookie" was brought into Guangzhou with these traders and became a everyday table cookie among the Cantonese. So, one day, someone, somewhere in the Pearl River delta used the cookie to describe the nose of Shar-Pei.
We shall further investigate this topic etymologically in section below,
An etymological approach
According to the "New Merriam-Webster Pocket Dictionary", the word etymology is defined as "the history of a linguistic form (as a word) shown by tracing its development and relationships". How people call a thing in a place sometime in history is determined by how people understand its environment at that time. We saw in the 20th century tremendous improvement in the means of transportation of human being from one place to the other. When traveling become more convenient, words travel too and sometime became part of the adopted language.
By reductive reasoning, that the Shar-Pei as a breed concept can go back only as far as the history of the Western culture itself in China. If the Chinese awareness of Shar-Pei as an unique breed go anything further back before the appearance of this Western cookie in Southern China, then the Chinese people must have adopted other Chinese figurative word to describe the nose of this breed. This implies that although the dog existed long before the Chinese think of it in any meaningful way, it was only when awareness of this dog as a breed triggers human being to look for a name for it.
In summary therefore, the Shar-Pei as a dog (Canis Familiaris) can go back thousands of years but as a breed, (etymologically) can only be about 300 years old.
This is similar to Carl von Linne (Carolus Linnaus 1707-1778) who invented the scientific classification of name. The scientific name for our daily loving dog is Canis Familiaris, we human are called Homo Sapiens etc. It does not mean that dogs and humans did not exist before Linnaus but it was during this period around Linnaus time that was regarded as the dawning of science, the awareness of human in general to their surrounding environment.
Then Charles Darwin (1809-1882) published his thesis "The Origin of Species by means of Natural Selection" in November 1859 and brought in for the first time in human history the concept of "Evolution". The first organized dog show in England was held in the Town Hall, Newcastle-on-Tyne on 28th/29th June 1859, only a few month before Darwin published his masterpiece.
Putting unrelated dates together, we begin to see a general picture on development of the concept of breed in the dog world.
-Carolus Linnaus 1707-1778 the similar base for "Butterfly cookie nose" naming system for Shar-Pei.
-The formation of The Thirteen Hongs of Canton 1720
-The Boston Tea Party 1774 -1776 dumping "British" tea but probably came from the "Hongs".
-The Opium War (1840) in Guangdong, China fought between the British and China ended in cession of Hong Kong to the British.
-First dog show in the world held in England in June 1859.
-Charles Darwin published his thesis on "Evolution" in November 1859.
Another marble slab unearthed at the same site. Sui period (592 AD) Shanxi Province, China
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Introduction
Breed history
