I guess everyone here has it pretty right about the chow dog. When I was growing up we had chows. They are pretty cat like to be honest. Our chow hated black people and hispanic people. Tolerated everyone in the family but was pretty much bonded to my mother. The dog wasn’t just huge or anything, but she (her name was “Muffin”) knocked down a 250lb man that walked on our porch one day trying to sell us something.
Something that I haven’t seen mentioned was how chows bark. All the chows we ever had didn’t really bark, they did this strange ‘stare you down and make these grunt-coughing noises’ thing. We had a big huge black male chow named Duke also. He was pretty big, and was very mean until he attacked my grandfather. Grandad grabbed a 2x4 out of the back of his truck and knocked Duke out with it. Ever since then, he had the demeanor of a lab. His vet thought that he was brain damaged, but he was a good dog after that.
I will tell you something though. When you grow up in a really bad part of town and they know you have chows, you house is the only one that doesn’t get broken into on the street.