The documentation in this paper shows that a large proportion of the morphological features that are typically associated with the wide variety of Western dog breeds is present today among the dogs of rural southern China. It is unlikely that this richness of phenotypes would originate from a recent extensive crossbreeding to European dogs, the dogs featured here being traditionally bred in rural villages with no known influence of European breeds and therefore most probably indigenous to southern China. To definitely rule out crossbreeding with European dogs as the source of this phenotype diversity, analyses of autosomal DNA variation [16] must be carried out on these dogs.