Cats have lived in this palace for over 600 years, since the Ming dynasty built it. Museum staff openly admit some of today’s strays are likely descended from real imperial pets — the ones that used to nap in rooms where emperors conducted actual state business.

One of those emperors took it way too far.

Jiajing, who ruled from 1522 to 1567, adored his cats to an almost administrative degree. Each cat in his care got its own personal caretaker. Not a shared staff. Not a rotation. One cat, one person, full-time. His favorite was named Shuang Mei — “Frosty Brow” — and by most accounts, Jiajing grieved her death the way you’d grieve an actual family member.

Running an empire and assigning individual staff to individual cats were, apparently, not mutually exclusive tasks for this particular emperor. History doesn’t record whether the cats appreciated the arrangement. They almost certainly did not.

Centuries later, the practical argument for cats in the palace is less sentimental and a lot more useful: priceless relics live in wooden buildings, and wooden buildings attract mice. Since 2009, the museum has run a trap-neuter-return program — catch the strays, get them fixed, mark them, put them back. It worked well enough that the population has stayed stable at roughly 200 cats for years.

A few of them became genuine celebrities. One, nicknamed Baidian’er — “White Dot” — went viral enough to inspire an actual stage play, co-produced by the museum itself, telling the Forbidden City’s history from a cat’s point of view. The museum has leaned into it since, selling a whole line of “Royal Cat Family” merchandise and installing larger-than-life cat statues near one of the palace gates.

So the math works out strangely in the cats’ favor. They get fed, housed, and vaccinated. In exchange, they keep the mice away from six centuries of irreplaceable artifacts — and somewhere in that arrangement, a Ming emperor’s obsession with cat staffing turned out to be a pretty solid long-term HR decision.