James Mellon Menzies: Zhang Shukai

1.
Zhang Shukai had a foreign brother named Arthur Menzies who is the son of James Mellon Menzies. James Mellon Menzies was an archaeologist that performed deep research of oracle bones and the Shang dynasty. He came to China as a missionary in 1910. He was the one of the people that decoded the oracle bones, the first who know how to identify bone’s age, had more than 35000 oracle bones’ collection. also he found the ideogram of di from the oracle bones, a Chinese god that inherited thousands of years in the Chinese history. But at Zhang Shukai’s years, China and Canada were belonging to different camp, the Communist and Capitalism, also China experienced Communist revolution and Cultural Revelation which led Zhang Shukai had to kept the secret.

2.
From Zhang Shukai’s story, we can know that it was a dark period for rich people, rural landlord capitalist. like Zhang Shukai, the son of a rural landlord, he suffered persecution from Maoist zealots. After the founding of People's Republic of China, there was a movement called Land Reform, the government confiscated arable land from rural landlord and then allocated those land
During Menzies’s time in China, he built the world largest private collection of oracle bones for more than 35000 pieces but more than 85% of those oracle bones were stay in China, also refused a high profit job offered by the Royal Ontario Museum and relied on the limited salaries of missionary survived for 26 years in China. After the withdrawal of Canadian missionaries, Menzies was always concerned about the oracle bones, when he saw the news of Japanese invade most northern part of Chinese, he advised his colleagues in China to hide the oracle bones, which saved more than 8000 bones. A counter example was William C. White, another missionary that transported thousands of invaluable treasures to the Royal Ontario Museum at the same period of