On a fine October day in 1922, the ordinarily blasé inhabitants of Peking watched excitedly as carts bearing two immense guardian lions bumped through crowded streets. Bystanders snapped photographs and shouted encouragement to workers struggling to haul the fifteen-ton chunks of stone over streetcar tracks to the imperial city’s railroad station. The twinned beasts were then crated for overseas shipment from the trading port of Tientsin to Portland, Oregon, en route to the Canadian city of Toronto. There these fierce but somehow endearing lions would soon become the locally cherished gatekeepers of the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM), itself a late but significant entry in the Western scramble for Chinese antiquities. In the accepted Canadian manner, its staff managed to build a world-class collection without fuss, scandal, or attracting even a moiety of applause south of the border.
Not just authenticity distinguishes ROM’s collection. Its suppliers were highly unusual, and their finds cast revealing light on the truly ancient origins of Chinese writing, on the Northern Song dynasty emperors who reigned over a forgotten urban paradise, and on a wandering tribe of Israelites who reached this Eden and stayed for a thousand years.
In these attainments, the Royal Ontario Museum owed much to an unlikely quartet. Its founding director, Charles Trick Currelly, was a proficient Egyptologist who quickly learned that better buys in antiquities could be found in East Asia. A key supplier was George Crofts, a rough-and-ready Anglo-Irish fur trader turned antiquarian dealer. Next came two clergymen: William Charles White, the Anglican bishop of Honan, who befriended tomb robbers and found a second career as a Sinologist. And finally, the quiet, dedicated Dr. James Mellon Menzies, a Presbyterian missionary, also based in Honan from 1923 to 1934, who was among the first foreigners to collect early oracle bones. No other Western museum with an outstanding Chinese collection owes as much to the servants of God, and even the very worldly George Crofts slashed his prices out of admiration for Canada.
Melee in Peking’s streets as Toronto’s twinned lions began their westward journey in 1922.
It was Crofts who deftly managed the uprooting of the Ontario Museum’s trademark lions with minimal controversy, a considerable feat. Originally, so it now appears, the ten-foot-tall lions guarded the entrance to a lavish estate containing a palace, pagodas, and manicured courtyards. This was the home of Prince Su, a powerful Manchu nobleman, one of the select Princes of the Iron Cap, a hereditary imperial order whose titles would be passed on “forever.” Unfortunately for Prince Su, his idyllic home adjoined the Legation Quarter, the central battlefield in the 1900 Boxer Rebellion.
After the siege in Peking ended with China’s defeat, Prince Su chose exile during the waning years of the imperial era. At some point, his lions were hauled away by the Italians, who found them too heavy to be used as garden ornaments, and the statues then passed to the Austro-Hungarian Legation. When in 1917 Republican China declared war on Austria and Germany, the government seized the assets of both belligerents. At what price Crofts acquired title in 1922 to the two lions remains obscure. Two facts can be ascertained: the founders of the ROM were anxious to establish their own area of specialty, and Director Charles Currelly was eager to oblige.
The Royal Ontario Museum owes its creation in good measure to civic pride, Methodism, and a wealthy banker named Byron Edmund Walker (who became Sir Edmund in 1910). An eclectic collector of everything from minerals and arrowheads to Old Master drawings, Walker yearned to establish Toronto as a globally important destination, an essential step being to found an up-to-date museum. To that end, though he was only formally devout, the banker turned to the city’s mostly Methodist financial elite, reminding its members that their social gospel “spoke to the need for enlightenment about the past and consequent social elevation for the future.” Walker’s prod was productive, and from its birth in 1914, the ROM had a Protestant ethic embedded in its character. Initially, the museum consisted of five separate divisions—archaeology, geology, mineralogy, paleontology, and zoology—but soon the sciences made extra room for the humanities, broadly construed.
This came about after Byron Edmund Walker, having secured the museum’s start-up funding, recruited an imaginative, ambitious, and up-to-date founding director. In 1902, wishing to add ancient scarabs to his growing eclectic collection, Walker learned from his son of an Egyptologist named Charles Trick Currelly, then twenty-six. The offspring of a well-to-do Methodist family, Currelly assured him that scarabs were available. It happened that he was as familiar with the Nile Valley as he was with Ontario’s prairies; while visiting Britain several years earlier, he had met and impressed W. M. Flinders Petrie, the era’s preeminent Egyptologist. Soon the young Canadian joined Petrie’s excavation team at major sites. In addition, he routinely accompanied prominent Toronto visitors on their winter tours of Egypt and offered insider advice on buying antiquities. In sum, Currelly was a worldly believer: the perfect mix for his museum career.
So it was no surprise that when the ROM opened its doors in 1914, its guiding director was C. T. Currelly, whose ambitious goals spanned centuries and continents (his memoirs, published in 1956, were aptly titled I Brought the Ages Home). Yet he looked to the future no less than the past. As the Canadian scholar Dennis Duffy relates, Currelly helped pioneer the child-friendly museum: “Any Toronto middle-class parent can describe in detail every inch of the dinosaur exhibits.” It also happened that ROM’s early years coincided with the outbreak of the Great War, to which Canada as a loyal dominion volunteered troops and treasure. The budget for acquisitions necessarily diminished, and expansion plans were put on hold. Then in 1918, Currelly encountered the perfect supplier for ROM’s postwar rebirth: George Crofts.
An adventurous black sheep born to a respectable Anglo-Irish family, Crofts left Cork County in his twenties to forge a new career in China as a fur trader. By 1896, he was solidly established in Tientsin, where he began dealing in antiquities. While visiting Toronto in 1916, he happened upon a color postcard at his hotel desk depicting a terra-cotta Buddhist figure recently acquired by the still-infant ROM. He recognized it as one of his own antiquities. A correspondence with Currelly followed, and in November 1918 Crofts returned to Toronto for a meeting with the director.
This conversation ensued as the dealer began displaying photographs of his current stock: “I’ve seen nothing like them. No such objects have appeared in England.” “You’re quite right, these are the finest so far discovered.” “Perhaps you would rather not talk prices, since we have no money, but if you would have no objection, I should very much like to know the prices of these two objects.” More such exchanges, and then (so Currelly later related): “Let me have the photographs please. I’m not allowed to run into debt for the museum, but I’ll tear the money out of Toronto in ten-cent pieces before we let such a catch slip.”
A check followed, as did a flow of purchases, mostly acquired at deep discounts. Over a six-year period, the former fur trader’s ROM trove of tomb sculptures, ceramics, and paintings exceeded five thousand items (see color plates, figure 9). In 1922, when the guardian lions arrived, Currelly informed the dealer that he had been awarded an honorary LL.D. by the University of Toronto, “the highest honour that there is, now that knighthoods are done away with [in Canada].” Part of the citation helped explain the provider’s success: “With the opening of a railway that had to cut through early tombs, many objects almost unknown were found.” The erstwhile fur trader now became Dr. George Crofts, an honorific that smoothed the way for other museum sales. In 1923, Langdon Warner, then director of the Pennsylvania Museum of Art, announced that Charles Currelly agreed to share in Dr. Crofts’s latest harvest of Chinese antiquities. Warner called particular attention to “the extraordinary grave figures of which the collection boasts so many and such splendid examples” (see color plates, figure 9.) As Warner elaborated, the Crofts artifacts complemented Philadelphia’s Tang dynasty collection:
Nowhere in the United States at least are to be seen finer horses and camels or more terrifying demons. One great glazed camel no less than two-feet three- inches high is all accoutered for the march. From his saddle hangs the water bottle . . . and on the other flank a side of dried meat, ribs and all. Even the realism of Hellenistic art is never more vivid than the sculpture of these great beasts, nor more gallant than the pose of the horses where they stand with bent necks and prick ears. So, too, the rows of little human figures, presumably the funeral procession of the dead, are as vigorous as anything from our own classical lands, though never reaching the pinnacles of imaginative art. . . . They present an opportunity for study which we in the United States have never before been offered, and in which the Royal Ontario Museum alone surpasses us.
A generous tribute, yet Warner’s words also suggest the perplexities of placing Chinese art within the established Western grid. In the conventional hierarchy, museum-quality art originated in the Near East, ascended from Greece to Rome, ripened in the European Renaissance, and passed by defined stages until the insurgent advent of the modernists. But where did “Chinese art” fit into this matrix? How and why did its richly sophisticated traditions evolve independently? Indeed, the very term “Chinese art” is “a quite recent invention, not much more than a hundred years old,” writes Oxford’s Craig Clunas in a survey tellingly titled Art in China. Hence the diligent effort among both scholars and theologians to puzzle out the origins of Chinese culture and seek possible ties with the Judeo-Christian West.
Canada was to play a conspicuous role in this quest, beginning with George Crofts. Not only his treasures but also his photographs and notebooks passed to the Royal Ontario Museum following his death in 1925. All proved a valuable resource in establishing the chronology, provenance, and authenticity of Chinese antiquities. The bargains thus became jewels.
The third figure in ROM’s quartet is Dr. William C. White, “Sometime Bishop of Honan, Keeper Emeritus of the East Asiatic Collection of the Royal Ontario Museum,” as he identified himself on the title page of his 1956 book, Bronze Culture of Ancient China. This followed Bishop White’s literally groundbreaking Bone Culture of Ancient China. Still earlier, in 1934, he published Tombs of Old Loyang: A Record of the Construction and Contents of a Group of Royal Tombs at Chin-t’sun, Honan, Probably Dating to 550 BC. As improbably, an early highlight was his discovery of the remnants of a near-forgotten synagogue not far from his own Trinity Cathedral in Kaifeng, once a Chinese imperial capital. Workmen were digging the foundation of a new missionary hospital when in 1912 their shovels uncovered three stone tablets commemorating the presence of an ancient Judaic place of worship.
Bishop William White in clerical regalia; he saved souls and antiquities while in Kaifeng, a former imperial capital.
A debate persists as to the dates and meaning of the inscriptions, but it is now widely accepted that Kaifeng for a millennium was home to an Israelite community that originated in Persian lands. The presence of Jews in China had, in fact, been noted by Marco Polo, then by Matteo Ricci and other Jesuit missionaries centuries ago. Sabbath rites in the Purity and Truth Synagogue evidently continued in Kaifeng until the 1850s, when natural disasters claimed the temple. More recently, Jewish scholars and Israeli enthusiasts have located and welcomed putative descendants of this truly Lost Tribe.
Thus sparked, Bishop White soon assumed a second career as an archaeologist. His methods were pragmatic: he felt obliged to socialize, hand and shovel, with tomb plunderers. On this, we have the testimony of Harvard’s John King Fairbank and of his artist-scholar wife, Wilma (who sketched the line drawing on the dust jacket of White’s last-named volume). “In the archaeological scramble of the 1930’s,” Fairbank recalls in his 1982 memoir, Chinabound, “Bishop White was able to contribute more than most foreigners. A year or more after our visit [with him], we found out what the bishop had been up to—a work of salvage and scientific archaeology achieved by very diplomatic dealings with local Chinese who sought to profit from China’s past.”
As a result, prizes from the week’s illicit digging were frequently left on the bishop’s back door. He was thus able to inspect—and acquire—the freshly discovered contents of tombs before they reached dealers in Peking. Of eight tombs described in his last-named volume, only one was scientifically excavated. The rest were commonly entered through shafts penetrated by Loyang spades, a specialized tool suited to the task. As described by Peter Hessler in Oracle Bones, the Loyang spade is “a tubular blade, cut in half like a scoop and then attached to a long pole.” This meant that larger pieces, such as bronze tripods, were not removed intact but often were forcibly broken. “Plainly this was no fly-by-night or surreptitious thievery but a long-term operation which must have been given protection by local men of substance,” Professor Fairbank writes. “The Nanking government had no rice-roots power in Honan.” Professional archaeology was still nascent in China. High-value sites were reburied after being stripped, as happened at the Chin-t’sun tomb. “Land for crops was simply too valuable” is Fairbank’s rueful epitaph.
What made this unusual collaboration possible was Bishop White’s unfrocked manner. Born British in Cornwall in 1873, “Will” (as everybody called him) was four when his father, a mason and contractor, resettled in Ontario. The youthful White was bright and brash, but also a churchgoer who kept a daily diary, each entry headed with a biblical admonition. While a teenager, scenting adventure, Will decided to become an Anglican missionary. He attended Wycliffe College in Toronto, was ordained in 1896, and on turning twenty-one circulated a poem signed “Socrates, Jr.,” with these final lines: “Come laugh with me! a boy again I am, / Although my years do say I am twenty-one.” (To his surprise and delight, a Toronto newspaper reprinted his verse.)
Dark haired, of medium height, and wiry, with his broad brows and deep voice, Will White remained (as someone said of Goethe), “an extraordinarily ordinary man in whom ordinary men might see themselves reflected.” Or, in the words of his biographer Lewis Calvin Walmsley, “He was driven by a restless eagerness and contagious mental excitement. He possessed an inveterate curiosity. He believed the world’s secrets were waiting for him to discover.” Such was the novitiate who, in May 1896, having just proposed to his sweetheart Annie Ray, learned that he was to be a missionary in China.
In February 1897, White sailed alone from Vancouver aboard the Empress of Japan. Arriving in Shanghai, he was informed that he had been posted to Fukien (now Fujian), a southern province deemed risky for “foreign devils,” his destination being a mountain town eight days’ travel by donkey carts from the venerable port of Foochow (now Fuzhou).
Once in Foochow, the apprentice missionary promptly purchased a Chinese gown and hat, together with an artificial pigtail. This was the Year of the Monkey, a time of plots and purges within the Manchu ruling elite that culminated in the Boxer Rising, the siege of the legations, and the flight from Peking of Dowager Empress Cixi.
The times were therefore as interesting as Will White could have wished. He now commenced his clerical duties in Kienning, a picturesque mountain town bounded by tea plantations draped in mist. Here White learned to speak and read Chinese, grew his own queue, and acquired a Chinese name, Huyai Li-kuan. In October 1897, Annie Ray arrived in Shanghai, where they wed. Mrs. White, who did not adopt Chinese dress, became the sensible ballast to her impulsive spouse.
Faced with these prevalent challenges at the century’s turn, the Canadian Church Missionary Society chose to expand rather than retreat. Its leaders had learned that hospitals and schools were the latchkeys to acceptance. White seemed ideally cast for a broad mandate. He had worked with lepers and had studied homeopathic medicine, he learned to play Chinese instruments, he knew how to make raspberry vinegar, and he was known as “the foreigner who speaks Chinese like a Chinese.” This especially mattered when missionaries came under attack as excessively privileged, a common grievance being their extraterritorial immunity from Chinese laws. So when the General Synod of the Anglican Communion assigned Honan to Canada, the dominion’s hierarchy turned to the young Ontario missionary to deal with a conspicuously fractious province. In 1909, at age thirty-six, Will White was consecrated as Canada’s first Anglican bishop in China, the youngest in his era to acquire the robes, miter, and orb of that holy office.
Within a year, the Whites were en route to Kaifeng, the ancient seat of the Northern Song, more recently capital of the province of Honan (Henan), encompassing 35 million inhabitants in 68,000 square miles. Borne in a sedan chair, the couple arrived during a blinding March dust storm. They were greeted (as White’s biographer relates) by a three-year-old boy holding out an empty rice bowl, who politely inquired, “Have you eaten your rice yet?” (the local equivalent of “How are you today?”). Soon enough, the new bishop seemed to blend into Kaifeng’s bustling thoroughfares. “With his slight lithe frame,” to quote Walmsley again, “he looked not unlike a dapper young Chinese when he appeared on the street. Fortunately, his hair was black, and his eyes were not so blue as to cause comment.” And propitiously, the urban past of his bishopric proved as compelling, though its glories still remain unknown, even to literate foreigners.
Kaifeng’s glory peaked when it was China’s imperial capital under nine Northern Song emperors (960–1126 CE). It is generally agreed that the Song rulers were among the most competent and enlightened in the Celestial Empire. Their reign witnessed the growth of cities, the debut of printed books, a burst of scientific discoveries, and the emergence of an elite political class chosen through rigorous examinations. As impressively, in the twelfth century Kaifeng itself ranked as the world’s largest city, its population estimated at 1.4 million, including inhabitants of nine suburbs and garrisoned military families, making Kaifeng three times the size of ancient Rome.
This surge became possible owing to Kaifeng’s proximity to the Yellow River and the recently opened Grand Canal. Thus coal and iron mined in North China could be traded for food grains loaded in barges from the fertile rice fields of South China. Kaifeng also became a mercantile crossroads, its bazaars enriched by caravans from Central Asia. Given peace and stability, this now-forgotten capital was for a period an urban paradise, its cheerful civility anticipating by a thousand years the animated street life idealized by Jane Jacobs in her Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961). On this, we have a visual witness: a seventeen-foot-long hand scroll attributed to the artist Zhang Zeduan (Chang Tse-tuan), titled Spring Festival on the River, believed by most scholars to depict Kaifeng at its apogee. Here is the city bountiful: a mosaic of shops, waterways, arched bridges, gardens, schools, temples, food markets, and theaters, interspersed with camel caravans, street musicians, acrobats, mandarins, and students, plus the Willow Quarter, with its courtesans and singing girls (the scroll is posted online by the University of Chicago).
Yet when the young Canadian primate surveyed his ecclesiastical realm in 1910, he found that this great metropolis had dwindled into a backwater provincial town. The old walls remained, as did an impressive pagoda and its maze of waterways and gardens. But Kaifeng’s monumental edifices had for the most part vanished, swept away in periodic deluges resulting from the city’s proximity to the floodplains of the Yellow River. Additionally, since large stones are scarce in Kaifeng’s region, earlier builders employed rammed earth and perishable wooden frames for larger structures. More durable were the area’s abundant tombs, sustaining the underground economy that enabled the primate to become an authorized supplier for C. T. Currelly’s Royal Ontario Museum.
“I soon worked out that we had been students together in Toronto,” Currelly recalls in his memoirs. “He presented us with a fine painting of about 1300 or 1400 [CE], a superb piece of drawing in wonderful condition. Owing to a friendship with one of the biggest antiquity dealers in Honan, he had been getting a good training in what was being found. . . . With all his gentleness, he had courage and saved his city from destruction.” The last sentence referred to White’s skills as a mediator during China’s chaotic decades. At one critical point, in the mid-1920s, the bishop sent an urgent message to Currelly, with disturbing news about menacing warlord armies:
The letter said that Bishop White had learned from an Englishman that, in a temple which he knew well, there was a marvelous fresco that, within ten minutes after these soldiers reached the town, they would pry out the heads from the fresco with their bayonets; the great picture which the monks and their predecessors had cherished for centuries would be ruined. The monks put the men to work to remove the fresco from the wall. The men cut through heavy clay plaster and took the picture down piece by piece. There were eighty pieces and these were wrapped in cotton and put in a cart and taken away; the monks did not know where, so no torture could make them tell. When the warlord arrived, there was nothing but a plain wall.
In Bishop White’s estimate, the endangered paintings dating from the Yuan dynasty were of outstanding merit, having been carefully preserved in the Xinghua Si Temple founded in 992 CE in a remote village in Shanxi Province. The monks were frantic. White urged Currelly to buy. In 1928, the director cabled an offer to the English go-between; in due course eighty fragments arrived at the museum and were carefully stored. Currelly sought advice on restoration from Langdon Warner, who recommended George Stout, a specialist at the Fogg Museum. With his counsel, ROM’s own technicians meticulously reassembled the forty-foot dry fresco painting, now known as The Paradise of Maitreya. At once devout and disarming, the mural depicts the Maitreya (The Buddha Who Is to Come), surrounded by a bevy of divinities, mortal nobles, and personal attendants, including his barber.
This purchase led to the ROM’s acquiring (via Yamanaka & Co.) two more Yuan dynasty wall paintings, also from imperiled monasteries in the same province. Titled The Lord of the Northern Dipper and The Lord of the Southern Dipper, the latter graphically depicts the twelve birds and beasts associated with the Celestial Empire’s named years. Taken together, in Currelly’s words, “we now have one of the most impressive groups of paintings I have ever seen.” (All have since been restored afresh and remounted dramatically in the museum’s Asian gallery.)
At the same time, Bishop White was providing the ROM with objects of a very different kind: ancient bronzes and inscribed bones, finds that together added a new prologue to China’s cultural history. It was thus no surprise that after retiring from his clerical post in 1935, Will White commenced a new career as keeper of the East Asiatic Collection at the Royal Ontario Museum. A stream of learned monographs followed, including his elaborately illustrated Chinese Temple Frescoes (1940), in which all three paintings are annotated. As John Ferguson (another missionary turned antiquarian) comments in his foreword to White’s earlier book on tombs, it seemed “most fortunate” that he was at hand and thus “through trusted agents was able to follow every stage of the operations and secure so many specimens from the contents of the grave.” Ferguson, who should know, fairly described the ongoing quandary of professional archaeologists in their struggle to save whatever prizes arise from China’s good earth, even at the hands of looters.
Yet his dilemma had a second horn. Not without reason, Bishop White had a high opinion of himself; he knew the value of a wink as regards niceties of the law. In his published works, he is discreetly silent concerning the means by which the objects he purchased came to his attention. And though he learned much about China’s Bronze Age from another missionary turned excavator, James Mellon Menzies, he gives scant recognition in his own writings to his colleague’s work. All this was freshly debated by the Chinese scholar Linfu Dong, the biographer of the Reverend James Menzies.
According to Linfu Dong, hundreds if not thousands of ROM’s Chinese treasures—jade, bronzes, pottery, and paintings—were illegally smuggled to Canada in violation of a 1930 law banning cultural exports. He asserts that Bishop White sent his wares through obscure railway stations, where inspection was unlikely, or packed objects in the luggage of other missionaries. These disclosures fanned a press controversy in China, although there has been no formal request for the restitution of ROM’s trove. And the dispute casts revealing light on the career of James Menzies, who in his professional ethics chose a different path from that of the bishop of Honan.
The Presbyterian missionary James Mellon Menzies is honored, unusually, not only in Canada but also in China, where he is cited as “the foremost Western scholar of Yin-Shang culture and oracle bone inscriptions.” In 2004, his longtime home in Anyang was designated a “Protected Treasure,” although he was unable to revisit his old residence before his death in 1957 owing to the Cold War. Menzies is of interest not only because of his pioneering role in Chinese archaeology but also because he resolutely insisted that most of his finds belonged to, and ought to remain in, China. In all, Menzies collected 35,913 inscribed oracle bones, as well as 23,000 other ancient artifacts.
Menzies critically helped rediscover the lost roots of the Chinese state and civilization. Until oracle bones were unearthed and deciphered, some speculated that China’s oldest dynasties, the Shang and Zhou, were at best amorphous or possibly mythical. But the discovery of “dragon bones,” inscribed turtle plastrons and cattle scapula, not only silenced skeptics but also demonstrated that Chinese is the oldest continuously written language.
Among China’s imperial dynasties, the Shang was the creative begetter; its thirty rulers reigned for seven centuries until the ascent of the Western Zhou. “With the conquest of the Shang dynasty by the Zhou,” summarizes John King Fairbank, “the Chinese state finally emerges. Here again, the new archaeological evidence, such as inscriptions on bronzes and newly excavated Zhou oracle bones fit together with the literary record of ancient places, people, and events long known from the classics and earliest histories.” The Zhou and the Shang created a new basis of legitimacy by endowing its rulers with a Mandate of Heaven. Thus a homogenous, industrious, and precocious populace blazed the trail leading to the Celestial Empire’s imperial dominion.
In a sense, all this proved the efficacy of ancient oracle bones. Their discovery dated to 1899, according to an oft-repeated story, when a senior Qing dynasty official named Yirong Wang was felled by malaria. His doctor prescribed a traditional remedy known colloquially as “dragon bones,” consisting of ground-up tortoise shells. But on visiting his local pharmacy in Peking, Wang noticed that the shells, before being ground into powder, were inscribed with still-legible characters like those he had seen on ancient bronzes. He was deep in his studies of these strange bones when the Boxer Rebellion erupted. As a newly appointed military commander during the legation siege, Wang faced surrender or flight when foreign armies overwhelmed Peking. He chose poison.
After his suicide, Wang’s thousand-odd collection passed to a colleague named Liu E, who in 1903 published the first book of oracular inscriptions but then ran afoul of state authorities on corruption charges and was exiled to Xinjiang, where he died in 1909. The authenticating task then passed to Duanfang, the celebrated Qing mandarin and a leading collector of antiquities, who offered premium prices for oracle bones. As described earlier, Duanfang was decapitated by his own rebellious troops during the successful 1911 revolt against the Manchu/Qing dynasty.
Such was the setting in the 1900s when James M. Menzies, a twenty-six-year-old Presbyterian missionary, arrived in China just in time to witness the final collapse of the world’s oldest established imperial system. Born in rural Ontario, trained as a civil engineer and land surveyor, Menzies found his new vocation through a YMCA camp. Once in China, as if by providential accident, he settled in Anyang in northern Honan, the very cradle of the now-vanishing Celestial Empire.
On the outskirts of Anyang, Menzies soon learned, lay a peasant field called the Waste of Yin, known to scavengers for the abundance of oracle bones and smashed pots littering its surface. Beneath this field lay the ruins of the last Shang capital and its royal court, together with quarters for servants and soldiers, and for diviners skilled in reading cracks in animal bones to discern the future. Hence archaeology became an active part of the Menzies ministry. In 1928, he worked with the Academia Sinica, the scientific panel established by the new Chinese government, in launching a decade of excavations in Anyang—the nation’s first such extended project. When not shoveling, Menzies pursued his missionary duties as a preacher, promoter of schools and health care, and at intervals as leader of a migratory ecclesiastical band. Even during China’s years of turmoil, the prelate and his team traveled from town to dusty town, set up stands loaded with food and literature, summoned the curious with gongs and drums, and then beamed magic-lantern images of Jesus and scenes of rural life in Canada.
Both the digging and the tours halted when the Japanese began their armed onslaught on China in 1937. The year before, Menzies, his wife Annie Belle, and their son, Arthur, left for a furlough in Canada, not knowing they would never return to Anyang. Once in Ontario, Menzies volunteered his services to the Royal Ontario Museum, registered as a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Toronto, submitted a dissertation on a Shang bronze weapon, and during World War II served in Washington as an advisor on China to the State Department.
An oracle bone collected by Menzies, inscribed with humanity’s oldest continuously written script.
Having resettled in Canada, Menzies still confronted an unsettled question: What was to be done with the huge collection of oracle bones and pottery fragments that had been sent to Canada? It was his intention to deed the trove to China, while contributing a representative portion to the Ontario Museum. Postwar, however, Canada had no diplomatic relations with the People’s Republic. “Shortly before his death in 1957,” according to his biographer Linfu Dong, “his wife Annie and his son Arthur met with the directors of the Royal Ontario Museum to discuss the Canadian portion of the Menzies collection. . . . As the best solution, the Menzies family agreed to sell a substantial portion to the museum. As part of the agreement finalized in 1960, the ROM and the University of Toronto established The Menzies Fund to publish and promote Chinese studies in Canada.” Sixteen books and monographs on the Shang dynasty have since been published, honoring the agreement in letter and spirit. Other sequels followed that would doubtless have comforted Menzies—notably that his son, Arthur, would become the Canadian ambassador to the People’s Republic, that Canada was to benefit substantially from Chinese immigrants, and that a family friend, the Hong Kong–born Adrienne Poy Clarkson, would become the first Canadian of Chinese origin to be named governor general, the symbolic surrogate of the British Crown.
Still, an epilogue followed whose dialectical symmetry would likely have pleased this self-effacing missionary. In Maoist times, the Reverend James Mellon Menzies was censured as a cultural imperialist, then gradually rehabilitated, culminating in a laudatory James Menzies Conference at Shandong University in 2000. Indeed, seeking a reconciling synthesis was the abiding theme of his career. As he wrote of himself, “While I had counted 1,000 persons baptized and many more prepared for the catechumens, yet perhaps my work on the bones permeated deeper into Chinese life than my work among the schools and churches of North Honan.”
After all, what was the deeper message of those inscribed tortoise shells? “In his studies of Shang religion,” summarizes his biographer, Linfu Dong, “Menzies came to the conclusion that the ancient Shang people who lived about the time of Moses in the Bible had worshipped a god they called Shangdi (usually translated as ‘Lord on High’). This was not a new idea, as it had been promulgated in the seventeenth century by the Jesuits, who, with no scientific evidence, speculated that the Zhou people introduced the idea of Tian, or ‘Heaven’, a supreme impersonal moral force that governs the universe and mankind.”
Menzies sided with the Jesuits. He believed he had found scientific proof in the ideograph Di or God that appeared in the venerable bones he was studying, sustaining his belief that the God of Moses also reached the Waste of Yin. Moreover, Menzies believed that the “Jesus doctrine” was not very different from the traditional ethical values of China’s ancient sages. He would not have been surprised at the gradual rehabilitation of Confucius, notably visible in the sage’s hometown, the city of Qufu in Shandong Province. As Evan Osnos reported in The New Yorker, “Near the cave where Confucius was said to have been born, a five-hundred-million-dollar museum-and-park complex is under construction; it includes a statue of Confucius that is nearly as tall as the Statue of Liberty. In its marketing, Qufu has adopted comparisons to Jerusalem and Mecca and calls itself ‘The Holy City of the Orient.’” (In 2013, it received 4.4 million visitors.) One can imagine a spectral smile and sigh emanating from the restless spirit of James Menzies, who once wisely said: “Some of us have to school ourselves in Chinese thought, and ideas, so that we know something of the soul and mind of China as well as the outside form.”
Still, the four principal creators of the Royal Ontario Museum have a more tangible memorial. The ROM is today Canada’s largest museum, with a collection totaling six million objects in all categories (fine arts, antiquities, natural science, and memorabilia). Yet today the museum’s members rarely judge it “on whether or not it has recently acquired some hundreds of artifacts.” So contends Chen Shen, the ROM’s current senior curator of Chinese art, who elaborates: “Rather, they are more interested in seeing what public programs it can offer, or what the next blockbuster exhibition will be.” To that end, the museum’s slogan is “Engage the World,” the aim being to “stay in tune with what new and young audiences seek and what the public expects.”
As an archaeologist with field experience in China, Chen Shen had excellent credentials for extending that outreach—not only across the Pacific, but also southward to the passively indifferent United States. This was illustrated in 2002 when Dr. Shen collaborated with three American museums, along with the Chinese People’s Republic, in organizing an eye-widening traveling exhibition titled Treasures from a Lost Civilization.
Here, for the first time in North America, were showcased a choice selection of recently unearthed artifacts that have radically revised the authorized version of early Chinese history (second millennium BCE). Here were mysterious bronzes, among them elegant wine vessels and grimacing humanoid demons, mixed in with jade pendants depicting hares, tortoises, and tigers—along with inscribed oracle bones and ceramics acquired decades ago by the ROM trinity: Crofts, White, and Menzies. Nearly all the several hundred newly excavated objects emerged from a dozen or more sites in Sichuan Province, campaigns sparked by the discovery in 1986 of two sacrificial pits at Sanxingdu near Chengdu, still as before the capital of Sichuan Province. According to Chen Shen, writing in a companion brochure, these finds unquestionably constituted “one of the great events in Chinese archaeology,” eroding the established consensus that “the Sichuan basin was a cultural backwater,” a region “that was under the shadow of cultural dominance from central China” until the Qin-Han dynasties (221 BCE–220 CE).
Two points deserve stressing. First, fittingly, supposedly provincial Toronto led the way in this major revision, since its museum was the first in the West to pioneer the systematic collection of oracle bones and ancient bronzes (as selectively featured in the 2002 exhibition.) Second, Treasures from a Lost Civilization helped enhance a collaborative tradition for a new millennium. It was organized with the full partnership of the Bureau of Cultural Relics, Sichuan Province, while its U.S. travels were managed by the Seattle Art Museum. After its West Coast debut, the exhibition moved to the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, then to the Metropolitan in New York, and finally to Toronto in October–November 2002. In a double sense, East and West joined in celebrating these amazing discoveries. Equally fittingly, when the ROM marked its hundredth anniversary in 2014, its signature exhibition was The Forbidden City: Inside the Court of China’s Emperors, focusing on the offstage life of the palace’s inhabitants. Some 250 objects never displayed outside of China intrigued an overflow stream of visitors to a show lavishly featured in Orientations, the global journal for devotees of Asian art. Once again, in a double sense, not bad for the provinces.