James Mellon Menzies

Early Years and Coming to China

James Mellon Menzies was born on 23 February 1885 in the small town of Clinton, Ontario, Canada. Diligent and studious from childhood, he graduated from the University of Toronto in 1907 with a bachelor's degree in civil engineering. Yet beyond his professional prospects he felt more deeply the call to spread the gospel, so he entered Knox College in Toronto to study theology, completed his studies in 1910 and was ordained a Presbyterian minister.

Encounter with the Ruins of Yin

That same year Menzies was sent by the Presbyterian Church in Canada across the ocean to China, where he joined the mission work in northern Henan. When he first arrived, he used his engineering skills to dig wells and build houses for the local people. In 1914 he was assigned to Zhangde Prefecture (now Anyang). It was on this land that, from the inscribed oracle bones that kept coming out of the ground, he confirmed that this was the site of Yinxu, the capital of the late Shang dynasty, and from then on oracle bones became his lifelong pursuit.

Collecting and Studying Oracle Bones

From 1914 on, while preaching and pastoring, Menzies paid close attention to collecting and examining the oracle bones scattered among the people. His collection eventually grew to tens of thousands of pieces and was at one time called the largest private collection in the world. In buying them he was repeatedly deceived by forgeries, but this drove him to study them closely, and he developed an exceptional eye for detecting fakes. In 1917 he published Yinxu Buci (殷虚卜辞) in Shanghai, containing a selection of 2,369 oracle bone pieces copied by his own hand; it became the first catalogue of oracle bones for the study of Western scholars and established his scholarly reputation.

Teaching at Cheeloo

In 1932 Menzies accepted a teaching post at Cheeloo University in Jinan, lecturing in archaeology and sinology. He wrote lecture notes such as Jiagu Yanjiu (甲骨研究, Studies of Oracle Bones) and Kaoguxue Tonglun (考古学通论, General Introduction to Archaeology), and published a number of works on ancient Chinese history and archaeology, training younger scholars.

Leaving China, Never to Return

In 1936 Menzies left China to return home on furlough. Unexpectedly, the War of Resistance against Japan broke out in full the following year, and he was never able to return to the China he deeply loved. In his later years he continued his scholarly work. On 16 March 1957 Menzies died in Toronto, resting in the Lord, at the age of 72.

Guarding a Cultural Heritage

Throughout his life Menzies served the Chinese people with the gospel and, with scientific rigour, guarded the ancient cultural heritage of this land. He is widely recognised as the first Westerner to visit Yinxu with a purely scholarly eye and as one of the Western founders of oracle bone studies. His former collection was later dispersed to Nanjing, the Palace Museum in Beijing, the Shandong Provincial Museum and the Royal Ontario Museum in Canada, among other places, and it remains a treasure valued by scholars in both China and the West.