It was a longhaired cat with white fur and pendulous ears. He named them "Catus Angorensis".Īn apparently now extinct longhaired cat from China was known as the Sumxu, a fold-eared cat which was reported from the area around Peking, China. They are very tame and the Portuguese have brought them from Persia into India.’ From this description it appears, that the Persian cats resemble, in colour, those we call Chartreux cats, and that, except in colour, have a perfect resemblance to the cat of Angora.īuffon had not seen these "Persian" cats himself, but he was familiar with the Angora in France and he apparently believed there was no difference between an Angora and a Persian except in colour (the cat was possibly a black smoke or blue smoke Angora). They extend and turn it upon their back, like the squirrel, the point resembling a plume of feathers. The most beautiful part of the body is the tail, which is very long, and covered with hair five or six inches in length. Besides, the hair is fine, shining, soft as silk, and so long, that, though not frizzled, it forms ringlets in some parts, and particularly under the throat. Their beauty consists in the colour of their hair, which is grey, and uniformly the same over the whole body, except that it is darker on the back and head, and clearer on the breast and belly, where it approaches to whiteness. The eighteenth-century French naturalist the Comte de Buffon quoted the 16th/17th Century Italian traveller Pietro della Valle: ‘In Europe there is a species of cats which properly belong to the province of Chorazan the USSR and Afghanistan. It is suggested that longhairs reached China from Iran (Persia), as a gift of the king of Persia. It was the existence of longhairs in China which led some to speculate that the longhair trait entered the domestic cat population through hybridisation with the Pallas cat. They were also known as Chinese (some longhairs were imported from China where they were known as four-ear cats due to the furnishings of the ear), Russian (the Russian Longhair or Russian Angora was known) and Indian. The first longhairs in Britain were variously described as Angoras or as French cats (the latter generally being white). Its head length and conformation are generally similar to the Turkish Angora except that its ears are set lower on the head. A tabby Angora cat is depicted in Buffon’s "Natural History" (1756). The longhaired cats from Persia were interbred with Turkish Angoras. The first documented ancestors of the Persian were imported from Persia into Italy in 1620 by Pietro della Valle, and from Turkey into France by Nicholas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc at around the same time. They were named after the Turkish city of Angora (Ankhara). Longhaired cats were first seen in Europe in the 1500s, first in Italy (1521) and then in France. The Persian group is defined as all varieties developed from cats imported from Turkey, Persia (now Iran), Afghanistan and Russia at the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries. The first longhairs recognised by the western cat fancies were Angoras and Persians whose histories are intertwined. LONGHAIRED CATS - ANGORA, PERSIAN AND RUSSIAN LONGHAIRS
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