Its roots are in China. Why is it the Japanese Chin?

The full narration of the video.

The Japanese Chin's ancestors were little dogs from the palaces of China. Flat face, big eyes, long black-and-white coat. It's thought to be family with the Pekingese and the Tibetan Spaniel. So how did it end up called Japanese? Follow its journey, and the odd stories pile up.

First stop: the sea. The earliest record is from the year 732, when envoys from Silla, a kingdom on the Korean Peninsula, presented a little dog to the Japanese court. The chronicle calls it a 'Shu dog', after an old Chinese place name. In Japan, it moved indoors. Back then, Japanese dogs usually lived outside in the yard.

So the Japanese invented a brand-new character for it: the 'animal' radical, plus the sign for 'middle'. One explanation: a dog kept in the middle of the house. Later, small dogs in Japan in general got called that. The liveliest stop came more than three hundred years ago, in Edo Castle.

The shogun of the day adored dogs, and the Chin became the castle's favorite lapdog. Records say some Chin rode into the castle in palanquins, escorted by officials. Breeders kept pairing the smallest, flattest-faced dogs, generation after generation. That's where today's Chin look was set.

Next stop: overseas. Over 170 years ago, an American fleet sailed into Japan, and its commodore left with a few Chin. Two of them, the story goes, ended up with Queen Victoria. Westerners only knew it came from Japan, so they named it the Japanese Spaniel.

It has nothing to do with spaniels. America's kennel club used that name for almost ninety years, and only in 1977 switched to Japanese Chin. Which raises the question: if its ancestors were Chinese, why does it count as a Japanese dog? Think of tempura. Battering and deep-frying arrived in Japan with the Portuguese over four hundred years ago.

But Japanese cooks reworked it again and again into what it is today, and the whole world calls it Japanese food. Dogs work the same way, only much slower: a recipe changes in one pot, a breed takes generation after generation. Dog breeders call it the 'country of origin': where a breed was shaped into what it looks like today.

In the World Canine Organization's standard for the Chin, the country of origin reads: Japan. So China is its ancestral home, and Japan is where it grew into the dog we know. It's not the only dog whose name and roots don't match. The French Bulldog's ancestors moved to France with English workers.

What else do you know whose name points to the wrong home?