The Chinese pastoral dog originated in China. It is very similar to the early Chinese wolf and coyote, with a short mouth and a flat forehead. Mainly distributed in the south of the Great Wall, east of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, and low-altitude Han agglomerations centered in the central region, they are widely found in Han villages in China and Southeast Asia. Now urbanization also widely regards Chinese pastoral dogs as pet dogs.

The Chinese pastoral dog was developed under the background of the Chinese Han people's farming society for thousands of years The product is a living fossil of history and culture. It has experienced thousands of years or even tens of thousands of years of natural and artificial selection of dog breeds in China. It is said that Qin Shihuang unified the Central Plains with Chinese pastoral dogs.