The Shih Tzu is now one of the world’s most recognizable companion dogs, but the modern breed survived an extraordinary historical bottleneck that left its future dependent on a tiny group of animals taken out of China before and around the middle of the 20th century. Once associated with imperial courts and carefully bred as a prized “lion dog,” the Shih Tzu largely disappeared from its historic Chinese breeding population during the political upheaval that followed the 1949 Communist Revolution.
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