Research Reveals That Ancient Trade Routes Delivered Domestic Cats to China

By Shiori Chen on June 5, 2025



Photo: Yun Bing via Wikimedia Commons (CC0 1.0)

With increasing urbanization, countries like China have seen pet ownership skyrocket, and cats have become especially popular. One of the nation’s most well-known native cats is the líhuā māo, or “leopard cat patterned cat,” a breed featured in Chinese folklore and now called the Dragon Li. This breed, developed from a common landrace of cats in China, raises a natural question: how did cats first arrive in the region?

Domestic cats first began living alongside humans around 10,000 years ago in what is now Turkey, and later spread to Europe through trade. However, their eastward migration has long remained a scientific mystery—until recently, when researchers corrected a previous misidentification.

In a recent study published on bioRxiv, researchers identified the first known cat in the region, dating from 706 to 883 CE during the Tang Dynasty. Genetic analysis shockingly revealed that the cat was genetically linked to a domestic cat from Kazakhstan and likely arrived via a dispersal route along the Silk Road.

This finding led scientists to correct earlier assumptions. For years, scientists believed that domestic cats lived in China by the late Neolithic Era, based on the remains of a felid found at a 5,400-year-old site in Western China. However, further genetic and morphological research showed those remains instead belonged to leopard cats, non-domesticated felids native to South, Southeast, and East Asia.

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