Few people change the course of their lives in a single moment of conviction. William Chalmers Burns was sixteen years old and already training as a law apprentice in Edinburgh when he felt what he described as his soul being pierced through, as if by a dart. Soon after, he walked thirty-six miles to Kilsyth, where his family lived, to tell them he was abandoning his plans for law and would pursue the ministry instead.
He was born in 1815 in the village of Dun, the son of the pastor William Hamilton Burns. He graduated from Aberdeen and studied theology in Glasgow, being licensed to preach in 1839, at the age of twenty-four. That same year, filling in for the pastor Robert Murray M’Cheyne in Dundee, he began to draw crowds.
In July 1839, preaching at his father’s church in Kilsyth, he saw a revival break out that soon spread to Dundee and much of Scotland. Over the following eight years, he traveled through England, Ireland, and Canada as an itinerant preacher, facing stonings and hostile crowds without ever giving up open-air preaching.
In 1847, he became the first missionary of the newly formed mission of the Presbyterian Church of England, sailing from Portsmouth bound for Hong Kong. He spent the voyage studying Cantonese and, upon arrival, lived with local families to learn the language and customs of the people.
His first years in China were marked by hard work and little visible fruit: in Canton, he spent sixteen months with almost no visible result, and later acknowledged, in letters, the spiritual toll of daily contact with an environment marked by opium and idolatry.
In 1855, in Shanghai, he met the young Hudson Taylor. The two became close friends and traveled together toward Swatow. Following Taylor’s example, Burns began wearing Chinese dress starting that December, seeking to reduce the commotion of the crowds and draw closer to the common people.
Taylor would later recognize in Burns a spiritual mentor, marked by constant prayer and radical simplicity. This companionship helped shape principles that, years later, would give form to the China Inland Mission.
Over twenty-one years as a missionary in China, Burns returned to Scotland only once, between 1854 and 1855, staying briefly with his family before going back to Asia. Mission historians also note that his intensely itinerant style, without a fixed parish or a long-term plan, left behind few organized church structures, unlike missionaries more focused on building local churches and institutions.
Burns spent his final years in Peking and later in Manchuria, still translating hymns and The Pilgrim’s Progress into Chinese dialects. He died in Newchwang in April 1868, at fifty-three, far from his family, asking to be buried in the Chinese clothes he had worn for more than a decade.
