This is Ilargi, my twelve year old female cat, and she’s not a siamese cat. She’s a Thai cat.
The modern Thailand, formerly kown as Siam, is the origin of several native breeds of oriental cats. The first oriental cat breed recongized in the West was the siamese, taking its name from Siam - although incorrectly, since that variety was extended over all the asian southeast.
In the own Siam, this cat breed is known as Wichienmaat, literally “moon diamond”. They were the theme of a famous collection of poems from the XVIII century in Siam, something that’s not strange at all. The siamese is a cat with an interesting and particular behaviour, and with a very different looking compared to other cats of the time. It wasn’t until the end of the XIX century when the cat was known in the western lands, mainly in England, where it causes such impact that between the end of the XIX and beginning of the XX century there was a sudden burst of expositions and championships of siamese cats.. And the cat that was imported in England wasn’t from any part of the asian southeast; it was from the very Siam. They were Wichienmaat.
However, the historical data (photographs included) say that the Wichienmaat were somewhat different than the modern siamese. And it’s here when the history of the origins of my cat becomes disconcerting and hard to follow, since many references are contradictory. Around the half of 1939, Siam changed its name to Thailand, and only two months later, the Second World War started. The Wichienmaat, restricted to Thailand, was wiped out. The siamese cats bred outside Thailand were already separate from the original looking, becoming more stylized and more matching with the western vision of how is an oriental cat.
After the war was over, the thailandese cat breeders tried to create again a cat variety equal to the Whichenmaat. Of course, for it they used as basis the existing varieties of siamese cat. The result was very close to the prototypical modern siamese: A white cat with brown touches, and several black parts: face, ears, socks and tail (colour combination that is known as seal point); of slim complexion, sharp features, and slightly big ears. Named again as siamese, it’s the variety par excellence, and it’s the looking we all think of when imagining a siamese cat (although there are siameses that look nothing like that image, as the Lynx Point which is completely white with slight beige touches and some black points in the forehead). The renewed success of the siamese cats made the grounds of the stereotypes of oriental cats closer to the egyptians than to other asian breeds such as the Persian.
Regardless of the past and present popularity of the modern siamese, it wasn’t yet the Wichienmaat which inspired the ancient poems of Siam, nor the siamese which landed in England at the end of the XIX century. The Wichienmaat was more robust and shorter, without being heavy. The eyes, always blue, were clean and never showed the defects attributed to the siamese, as crossed eyes from birth or miopy at older ages. And the head was very far from the sharp features of the typical siamese, being more close to the european cats’ head. Actually, the Wichienmaat could have been described as an stylized european cat, and with the coat of a Seal Point siamese. In this aspect, they didn’t look as oriental cats, not to the extreme of the modern siamese. It’s probable that this caused that the features which rendered the modern siamese (big ears, slimness and longness) were boosted, and the original features which can be seen in siamese cats from photographs of the beginning of the XX century were discarded, when they still looked like, and still were, the Wichienmaat.
In later attempts, breeders finally recovered the Wichienmaat, the old and classic Siam cat, and maybe to honour the new name they renamed it as Thai. For many years, the Thai were still called “old-style siamese”, what reaffirms its status of ancient breed of cats, without discrediting the modern siamese from the cat canon. Around 1990 the breeders and followers of the old-style siamese, the Wichienmaat or Thai, started to reivindicate to the world and the TICA (The International Cat Association) that the Thai stopped being a variety of siamese to become a distinctive breed at the same level of balinese and burmese. Nowadays, the TICA describes the Thai as the breed dedicated to preserve the features of the native Thailand cats: the Wichienmaat.
And my cat Ilargi could very well be described as an european cat somewhat stylized, with clear blue eyes, and with seal point colours. No doubt that during its twelve years of life, she has been the living being that I’ve been with the most, so I can state that I know well both her personality and temperament as her physical looking. And personally (without being a cat expert), I think that my cat is a mixture between siamese and Thai, although I would classify her as Thai because she doesn’t have any siamese feature, but all of the Thai.
As a curious coincidence, Ilargi means “Moon” in euskera (the basque language). The Wichienmaat are still alive, reincarnated in my cat. Which for me is more valuable than a diamond, even than a moon diamond.
Sources: Wikipedia, The Cat Encyclopedia, and The International Cat Association. ¡Reading is good, but thinking is even better!
¿La intención es lo que cuenta? »« Remember, remember, the Fifth of November
