There's much talk in recent years about maintaining the original working abilities of various dog breeds. The American Kennel Club has hunting tests and trials for the sporting dogs and beagles, herding tests and trials for herding dogs and Samoyeds, go-to-ground tests for terriers, and lure coursing events for sighthounds. The Newfoundland club has water trials and draft tests and the Dalmatian club includes events on horseback that prove the breed's stamina. And owners of German Shepherds, Rottweilers, and some other working breeds participate in schutzhund trials to prove endurance, intelligence, and guardian ability of their dogs.

The toy breeds need no such elaborate events or exhaustive training that gets them ready for competition — each and every one excels at the job it was bred to do without long hours of preparation. These are the ultimate companions, developed and bred as pets, and the Shih Tzu's joy for life and unsurpassed royal bearing make him one of the most popular of the group.

The Shih Tzu (pronounced Shid Zoo in singular and plural) comes by his regal attitude quite honestly, for he was developed as a favored pet of Chinese emperors of the Manchu Dynasty from the middle of the 19th Century. But his history begins centuries earlier, as one of Tibet's "lion dogs," an exclusive group of dogs bred by Buddhist monks that includes the Lhasa Apso and Tibetan Spaniel. In 1850, as was their custom, the monks sent several of their treasured temple dogs to Manchu emperors in Peking, and the Chinese called these dogs Tibetan Shih Tzu Kou, or Tibetan Lion Dog. The dogs were bred specifically to please the emperors in each palace, and type varied.

In 1908, the Dalai Lama, Tibet's spiritual leader, sent some small dogs of Shih Tzu type to Tzu Hsi, Dowager Empress of the Manchu Dynasty. The Empress was a renowned breeder of Pekingese and added the Shih Tzu to her interests. At this time, three types of dogs were bred as palace companions with little difference in type but with different coat length. Tzu Hsi closely supervised the initial Shih Tzu breeding to maintain breed characteristics separate from the Pekingese, but after her death that same year, breeding practices became sloppy and cross-bleedings with Pekingese and Pugs probably occurred.

For the next four years, there was much competition among the various palaces to produce dogs of the finest coats and colors, so breeding practices were tightly guarded secrets and records were not kept. Dogs of poor quality were sold in the marketplace, and dogs of fine quality were often smuggled out of the palaces and given as gifts to foreign visitors or Chinese noblemen. Breed identity was often confused.

The Manchu Dynasty perished in 1912 when Tzu's successor abdicated to revolutionary forces that eventually established the Communist government in China. Many of the royal dogs were slaughtered during the stormy months that followed.

Shih Tzu found their way west to England when Lady Browning discovered the breed in Peking in 1930. Originally classified as "Apsos," the Shih Tzu was ruled a separate breed by The Kennel Club by 1935. American soldiers stationed in England during World War II became enchanted with the little dogs and brought some back to the US. The breed was not recognized by the AKC until 1969, so those first imported dogs were often registered as and crossbred with Lhasa Apsos. AKC requires six generations of pure breeding after an outcross to establish a breed as unsullied, so the early Lhasa crosses in this country and a deliberate cross with Pekingese in England in 1952 delayed US recognition.

Such a bumpy beginning for the breed has not hurt its ultimate popularity. In 1994, the Shih Tzu was the 12th most popular dog of AKC's 139 breeds with more than 37 thousand new individual registrations. Only two toy breeds, the Pomeranian and the Yorkshire Terrier, are higher on the list at numbers 10 and 11 respectively.