Historical Cat
Wong Mau
c. 1930
The small brown cat brought from Burma to San Francisco in 1930 who became the single foundation cat of the entire Burmese breed.
- Owner
- Dr Joseph Cheesman Thompson
- Years
- c. 1930
- Known for
- Historical Cat
Wong Mau was a small, walnut-brown female cat brought from Burma to San Francisco around 1930 by Dr Joseph Cheesman Thompson, a retired US Navy physician with a keen interest in cats. Her rich, warm coat set her apart from the Siamese cats familiar in the West, and Thompson became convinced she represented a distinct type worth establishing as a breed.
Because there were no other cats like her to breed from, Wong Mau was mated to a seal-point Siamese, and her descendants were then carefully bred back and selected over successive generations. Working with geneticists and fellow breeders, Thompson used this programme to tease apart the coat colours in her lineage and to fix the solid brown, or sable, coat that defines the Burmese. In doing so, Wong Mau became the foundation cat from which the entire modern Burmese breed descends.
Her importance goes beyond one breed. The structured, genetics-minded programme built around her was one of the earliest deliberate efforts to found a cat breed from a single, carefully studied individual, and it helped shape how pedigree cats were developed and understood in the twentieth century. Today every Burmese cat traces its ancestry back to that one small brown traveller, making Wong Mau one of the most quietly influential cats in the history of the cat fancy.