The late Lord Curzon once said, “in the heart of Asia, lasts to this day the one mystery which the nineteenth century has still left to the twentieth to explore—the Tibetan oracle of Lhasa.” A Lieutenant Colonel in the Indian Medical Service, L Austine Waddel, when writing about the capital of Tibet in 1905 said, “wreathed in the romance of centuries, Lhasa, the secret citadel of the ‘undying’ Grand Lama, has stood shrouded in impenetrable mystery on the Roof-of-the-World, alluring yet defying our most adventurous travellers to enter her closed gates. With all the fascination of an unsolved enigma, this mysterious city has held the imagination captive as one of the last secret places on this earth, as the Mecca of East Asia, the sacred city where the ‘Living Buddha’ enthroned as a god reigns eternally over his empire”. So truly, to quote an old Tibetan proverb, “all roads lead to Lhasa”.

In 1981, Mr. J. Taring wrote in the Tibetan Journal that he did not know when pet dogs came into existence in Tibet. There ‘are’ no books about dogs in Tibet. As a high up fourth rank government official in the Revenue and Treasury Department in Lhasa, the capital of Tibet, he was in a position to know! So how can any modern writer have the audacity to draw conclusions about the origins and history of the various Tibetan breeds known in the Western world today? Especially when in January 1913, A Croxton Smith wrote in the Kennel Gazette, “writing about foreign dogs in this country is almost as profitless a task as discoursing about snakes in Ireland!” Although we are faced with a lack of facts going back in time and shrouded with the mysteries of Tibet, we are still able to determine much of their history—but much of it is probably wreathed in the romance of centuries.

Centuries before the start of the Christian era, at a time when our woad-painted ancestors were roaming the forests of Great Britain, Tibetan Spaniels were treasured pets at cultured Oriental courts. They were valued for their intelligence and beauty: the most highly sort-after spaniels being the smaller specimens. Indeed, so highly prized were the spaniels that successive ruling dynasties at Lhasa gave them as part of the annual tribute to emperors of China at Peking.