designing your pekingese

Today I'm bringing you a snippet from a 1914 book, in which we learn that being an Imperial Pekingese involved, in essence, punching oneself in the face repeatedly.
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The Lion, or Sun Dogs, as they were also called, were so highly prized by the Emperors of China and the Court that they were kept exclusively in the Imperial Palace at Pekin, and in the Temples, as Sacred Dogs. No person outside the Palace or Temples was even permitted to see them, and anyone who ventured to remove one of these dogs from the Sacred Precincts met with the certain punishment of a lingering death. 

The greatest care was taken of them, each having a slave girl to attend to it and massage its nose to the flatness regarded as one of the chief beauties in this breed. One method of attaining this flatness of the nose, and the prominent eyes, was to nail a piece of hard meat to a wall or board, and the dog in jumping up to get it hit its nose, and its eyes started out of the head, in the many vain attempts to get the tough dainty.

-- from Daniel, M. N. (1914). Some Pekingese pets. London: John Lane company. 10-11.