What Shih Tzu Means in Chinese the Lion Dog

A Shih Tzu answers to three Chinese names, and which one you meet depends on where you are reading. 獅子狗 is the old descriptive name and the source of the English spelling. 西施犬 (Xī Shī quǎn) is the modern standard one, and it is what the Cambridge Dictionary lists alongside 狮子狗. 菊花狗, chrysanthemum dog, is a nickname about the coat.

Singapore print and clinic paperwork use simplified Chinese characters, so expect 狮子狗 rather than the traditional 獅子狗. The two scripts say exactly the same word. Cambridge even glosses the breed in English as the Chinese Lion Dog, which is the closest an English dictionary gets to the original.

Tzu does not mean dog. It is the second half of 獅子 (shīzi), the everyday Mandarin word for lion, where 子 works as a noun suffix rather than as a word in its own right. On its own 子 does mean child, which is where the confusion starts, but nobody hearing 獅子 thinks "lion child". They think lion.

The word for dog is 狗 (gǒu) in speech, or 犬 (quǎn) in formal and written Chinese, which is why the modern breed name 西施犬 ends the way it does. You will still find "tzu means dog" repeated on breed sites, in dog-name lists, and on at least two pages currently ranking for this exact question. It is wrong, and it is worth getting right, because it is the difference between calling your dog a lion and calling it a lion dog.

西施犬 (Xī Shī quǎn) means Xi Shi dog. Xi Shi 西施 lived in the 5th century BC and is counted among the Four Great Beauties, 四大美女, of ancient China. The legend says fish forgot how to swim and sank when she leaned over the water to look at them.

Naming a flat-faced, floor-length lapdog after the most beautiful woman in Chinese history is not a description. It is a compliment, and a fairly funny one. Nobody has firmly documented when 西施犬 overtook 獅子狗 as the everyday name either; Wiktionary's own etymology note flags the shift as needing a source, so treat any confident date you read elsewhere with suspicion.

No lion has ever lived wild in China. The lion arrived as an idea, through Buddhism, where it is sacred and protective, and where legend has the Buddha arriving on the back of one. Craftsmen carving guardian lions were working from description rather than observation, which is why the statues look less like an animal and more like a stylised, curly-maned, wide-headed creature.

That creature is more or less what a Shih Tzu looks like. A dog bred to resemble the statue was a living version of a protective symbol, kept where the symbol mattered most. The lion cues survive in the modern breed: the mane-like ruff around the neck, the broad round head, the tail carried high over the back. What did not survive was anything lion-like about the personality, which is a mercy. Our guide to what a Shih Tzu is actually like to live with covers the gap between the symbol and the sofa.

Cixi held power in China from 1861 to 1908, and older English books spell her name Tz'u Hsi, which is the same Wade-Giles system that gave us Shih Tzu. She kept kennels of Pugs and Pekingese, and the Dalai Lama is said to have gifted her a breeding pair of Shih Tzu-type dogs in the 1860s.

From that pair she built a dedicated breeding programme, run by palace eunuchs, with the dogs housed and bred inside the palace itself. When she died in 1908 the programme died with her. The dogs were dispersed, and within a generation the breed had become genuinely rare in its own country.

Singapore's Chinese nickname is 獅城 (simplified 狮城), shīchéng, Lion City. The 獅 in 獅城 is the same character as the 獅 in 獅子狗. A city named for a lion, and a dog named for a lion, sharing one character and one idea.

Neither lion is real. Singapura comes from Sanskrit siṃha, lion, and pura, city, after a sighting on the island in 1299 that almost certainly was not a lion. The Shih Tzu, meanwhile, was bred to resemble a statue of an animal that never lived in China. Both are symbols people chose and then built things around, which is quite possibly the most Singaporean thing about the breed, and it is why every page on this site about the Shih Tzu in Singapore calls it the lion dog and means it.

Naming a lion dog in Chinese opens a whole extra set of options, and the good ones tend to be short. Two syllables, ideally with a repeated sound, because that is what a dog can actually pick out across a room. Doubling a character is the standard trick: 金金 lands better than 金 on its own.

Below are six that suit this breed rather than any dog. Pick for the coat colour, for the lion heritage, or for the character you can already see at eight weeks old. If you would rather browse a longer list in both languages, we keep name ideas for a Shih Tzu puppy on a separate page.

The lion mane is the grooming bill. A Shih Tzu grows hair rather than fur, continuously, like human hair, so the coat needs daily brushing to stay out of a mat plus a professional groom every 4 to 6 weeks for the dog's whole life. In Singapore that runs $75 to $120 a session, roughly $900 to $1,400 a year, every year.

The flat face that reads as a lion is also a heat profile. A short muzzle moves less air, this climate does not forgive that, and walks end up planned around the hour rather than the mood. The legal side is simpler but no more optional: the Shih Tzu is HDB approved, item 48 on the official list, one approved dog per flat, with a mandatory AVS licence and a free AVS pet ownership course for first-time owners. Every Shih Tzu Singapore families keep in a flat lives under those same rules, heritage or not.

Those are the two questions we ask before recommending this breed to anyone. Are you ready for the grooming, and do you understand the flat face. The heritage is lovely. It grooms nothing.