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- In the preface to his first book Oracle Records from the Waste of Yin, published by Kelly and Walsh in Shanghai in 1917, James Menzies records that
Early in the spring of the year Chia Yin (1914) the writer was riding his old white horse along the south bank of the Yuan river north of Changte city in the province of Honan. The ground had just been harrowed for cotton planting, and the farmers had thrown freshly ploughed up potsherds and rubble to the edge of the fields. A number of potsherds of a very early date attracted the rider�s attention.
Some local urchins asked if he would be interested in some dragon bones with characters on them. He replied that he would be very interested to see them.
Off he went around the bend and up over a barren, sandy waste to a little hollow on the western slope white with powdered particles of bones. This was the Waste of Yin, the ancient capital of Wu I of the Yin Dynasty, lost in the centuries before Confucius and only known to have been �North of the River�� (Bamboo Annals, Wu I Third Year).
Mr. Menzies goes on to state that
The writer, then, was the first foreign or Chinese archaeologist to visit the Waste of Yin with a purely scientific interest in these objects. Many a subsequent day has he stolen away on his old white horse to tread the ruins of this old adobe city.
Mr. Menzies rewarded the urchins with some small coins and became known in the nearby village of Xiao Tun as the foreign missionary who was interested in inscribed bone fragments and old pottery pieces that might be turned up by ploughing or in digging a well. On a modest missionary salary he did not have the means to buy big items that would command a high price in Peking. But, by regularly visiting Xiao Tun villagers and the local curio dealers of Zhangde, and by receiving curio peddlers, he picked up a great deal of information about where, and in what groups, old artifacts had been found. He reckoned that he could learn much about the manner of living of the early Chinese from studying imperfect or broken pieces. These he could buy cheaply because they could not be sold in the curio shops of Peking. In this way he built up a network of information about archaeological and art objects which were found in North Henan in those early years, 1914-1917.
Early in 1917 Mr. Menzies was recruited with a number of other Canadian missionaries to serve in the British Imperial Army as officers commanding the 96,000 North Chinese recruited into the Chinese Labour Corps to unload ships and to build railway lines and roads to carry supplies to the front in France. As a Chinese speaking civil engineer he served as a Staff Captain from 1917-1920 in France during the decisive months of the war and post-armistice clean-up. During leave periods he could visit museums in England.
After a brief furlough in Canada Mr. Menzies returned in 1921 with his family to Zhangde, Henan. The subsequent years were known as the the warlord period because of the constant interplay of local bandits and the struggle at the provincial level between the armies of the regional warlords. Mr. Menzies continued in evangelistic work, but increasingly directed his efforts into the establishment of a modern infrastructure of elementary and secondary schools and the preparation of young potential leaders for university education. In this process he learned the importance to Chinese students of finding a nexus between pride in their great Chinese cultural heritage and the modern science, technology and democratic governmental procedures being introduced from the West.
In 1924 the great majority of Canadian Presbyterian missionaries in North Henan decided to join in the United Church of Canada. Shortly thereafter the
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