御猫

Identity / Role

The fur-soul of the Forbidden City palace cat, guardian spirit of Ming-Qing court cat culture and the modern Palace Museum creative craze. Positioned for Palace Museum cultural products, she is the cute closing deity of the Baixiang series, charged with watching over the whole line.

Personality

Proud and languid — shows up only when there is food, and once arrived, never leaves. Patrols the walls by day and the books by night; decided six hundred years ago that the Forbidden City is home and has not moved since.

Worldview Story

Through the Ming and Qing, cats were kept in the Forbidden City to guard the books. In the Ming, the palace cat Shuangmei followed Emperor Jiajing into his tomb; in the Qing, palace cats were entered in official registers. They kept the palace free of rats and kept the sovereign company through the long nights of the inner court. Yu Mao is the spirit born of today internet-famous cats on the red walls of the Palace Museum. She remembers the legend of her ancestor Shuangmei, the scent of ink in the Wenyuan Pavilion, and the cheers of visitors at four every afternoon from behind the railings. She has kept watch from the Ming to this day — has seen emperors, and has seen the ticket office, and finds present-day people far more interesting. Now she has become a child figure crouching on a wall, placed on windowsills as the hundredth member of Zhonghua Baixiang, using the gaze she honed over six centuries to watch over all hundred of her companions.