Chang Tuan’s Cats – A Poem

Scholar Chang Tuan was fond of cats,
And had seven of them,
Wonderful beasts with wonderful names.
They were:


Guardian of the East
White Phoenix
Purple Blossom
Drive-Away-Vexation
Brocade Sash
Cloud Pattern
Ten Thousand Strings of Cash


Each was worth several pieces of gold,
And nothing could persuade Chang
To part with them.

— Wang Chih (c. 1100 C.E.)

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s