Cross Culture and Faith: The Life and Work of James Mellon Menzies

Ashley Thomson is a full librarian at Laurentian University and co-editor or co-author of nine books, most recently Margaret Atwood: A Reference Guide, 1988-2005.

This splendid book is based on Dr. Dong’s 2001 Ph.D. thesis, “The
Search for God in Ancient China: James Mellon Menzies, China Missionary
and Archaeologist,” successfully defended at Toronto’s York
University. In some sense, it is appropriate that Dong, now a professor
at Ocean University of China in Quindao, came to a Canadian university
to write about a Canadian who spent much of his professional life in
China.

While the book is the complete story of Menzies’s life, it is as a
missionary/archaeologist that he is remembered. His signal
accomplishment was his role in discovering, identifying, and explaining
the oracle bones—the religious documents produced by the Shang people
(ca. 1600 BC–ca. 1046 BC) uncovered at the “Waste of Yin,” a site
near Menzies’ mission station.

His interest in the artifacts was unique from two perspectives. First,
he saw them as way of bridging the gap between Chinese culture and
Christianity. Through his work, Menzies discovered the Shang concept of
Shangri, the term that Protestant missions used to translate the
Christian concept of God, which Menzies thought “as good a primitive
idea of God as the Hebrews before Moses.” Second, Menzies believed
that all artifacts he uncovered should remain in China, not be shipped
off to foreign museums. The opposite view was held by Anglican Bishop
William Charles White, a missionary who spent much of his time sending
Chinese antiquities to the Royal Ontario Museum.

Part of the interest in this book is Dong’s exploration of the
relationship between White and Menzies. When they were both young, White
gave permission to Menzies to marry his future wife, then attached to
White’s mission. Later, after both had returned to Toronto, White
became Menzies’s Ph.D. supervisor, using that position to steal
Menzies’ ideas. Upon his retirement, White also blocked Menzies from
replacing him as head of the School of Chinese Studies.

Based on unpublished family papers, family interviews, and a mountain
of secondary sources, both in English and Chinese, Dong has given us a
wonderfully accessible book, marred only by the absence of good maps.