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- DR. JAMES M. MENZIES
B.A.Sc., D.L.S., B.D., Ph.D.
His Interest in Chinese Archaeology and Art.
Jimmy �old bones� Menzies, as he was affectionately called by his friends, developed his interest in Chinese archaeology almost as an accidental result of his posting in 1914 to Zhangde, Anyang County, Henan as a Canadian Presbyterian missionary with prior training in civil engineering. The accident was that Anyang was the site of the unidentified last capital of the Shang Dynasty which ruled there from the fourteenth to eleventh centuries B.C.
James Menzies was born in Clinton, Ontario in 1885. He attended Leamington High School and graduated in civil engineering (B.A.Sc.) from the University of Toronto and as a Dominion Land Surveyor (D.L.S.). He did survey work each summer. He became active in the Y.M.C.A. and the Student Volunteer Movement and decided to enter Knox College to study theology. After graduating in 1910 he applied and was accepted to be a missionary of the Presbyterian Church of Canada in North Henan, China.
On arrival in China he was assigned first to Huaijing and then to Wu An, Henan province for Chinese language study. Around Wu An there were a number of old Buddhist temples and monasteries which aroused his interest in Chinese history and culture. In 1911 he was married in Kaifeng to Annie Belle Sedgwick, a Deaconess of the Church of England in Canada mission, headed by Bishop W. C. White. They were transfered in 1914 to Zhangde, called Anyang today, to do evangelistic work. He also continued his study of early Chinese history. This was facilitated by the practice of old style Chinese language teachers in using the Chinese Classics as basic study materials, in addition to the Chinese translation of the Bible and other Christian literature. All would-be Chinese scholars in those days learned Chinese by memorizing portions of the Classics, made up of the 2,500 year old works of sages like Confucius and Mencius, dynastic histories, etc. that had been engraved on stone tablets and copied and recopied.
It was known from Chinese historical sources that the Shang Dynasty (16th- 11th centuries B.C.) had had several capitals but their exact locations were unknown. In 1900 a Chinese scholar named Wang Yurong (also known as Wang Liansheng) visited a Chinese medicine shop in Peking to buy some dragon bones for medicine. Among the fragments was a small piece on which were engraved delicate characters, which resembled the characters on the earliest bronze ritual vessels which he had studied. He enquired where the bone fragments had come from but got an evasive reply. Wang was the first to identify the inscriptions on the bone fragments with the earliest known Chinese characters. After his death his collection of inscribed bones was sold to Liu Wa (Liu Tieyun).
Luo Zhenyu, a friend of Liu Wa, acquired through a curio dealer, several thousand pieces of inscribed bone. In 1912 he wrote a book called Yin Xu Shu Ji Qianbian (The first volume of the Records of Waste of Yin). The exact location of the site from which the inscribed bone fragments came was still kept secret by the local curio dealers.
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