The first Siamese cat in the United States arrived in 1878 in a Wells Fargo crate, after two months of travel by land and sea, to live with the family of President Rutherford B. Hayes. It was named, unimaginatively, Siam. A veterinarian prescribed beef tea and milk every three hours. It did not survive long in Washington.

The manuscript The Public Domain Review has assembled is older than the cat and considerably more optimistic about feline fortune — a nineteenth-century Thai Tamra Maew, or “treatise on cats,” held by the Library of Congress.

What the genre involved:

  • Cat treatises circulated in what is now Thailand from the Ayutthaya period (1351–1767), but every surviving example postdates the 1767 sack of the capital by the Burmese, which destroyed earlier manuscripts and artworks
  • They were written on mulberry bark and bound in concertina format
  • They belonged to a family of Siamese manuscripts taxonomizing animals of royal or religious significance — the same kind of document was made for horses and elephants
  • Most versions enumerate seventeen breeds of cat

They were prescriptive as well as descriptive. Alongside the auspicious cats came warnings against cats with tiger-patterned coats, cats that ate their own young, cats with bloodred eyes that stole food, and cats that would sit on their own curled-up tails.

Each illustration is paired with a poetic description and a note on the benefit an owner could expect — riches, good health. Translations published in Cabinet magazine give the register: eyes “like dewdrops on a lotus,” eyes “lit like fireflies, applied liquid gold,” a body “colored as a conch shell,” a cat “white as cliffs.” The subtype names carry the same charm: Dark Sapphire, Excellence, Jeweled Cloth, Lao Flower.

The Hayes cat belonged to the breed called Wichien Maat, or Moon Diamond — the Classic Siamese — which King Rama V reportedly liked to give as a diplomatic present. A carefully selected Wichien Maat presided over the coronation of the current king, Rama X, though theories persist that the cat in the ceremony was a doll.

Many of the others have not been so lucky. Of the seventeen breeds in most versions of the treatise, only a handful are known to survive today.