Remember when ... Famous missionary of Mongolia was commemorated

THIRTY-SIX years after his death in 1891, the celebrated missionary to Mongolia, James Gilmour, was honoured at a ceremony at the cottage in Glasgow’s Cathkin Braes, where he had been born.

The ceremony, on May 15, 1927, saw the unveiling of a bronze tablet, fixed on the outer wall of the cottage. On it there was inscribed an eloquent appreciation expressed by the Mongolians of Gilmour in the words, “He bore the likeness of Jesus Christ”. The ceremony was attended by some 350 Congregationalists.

“James Gilmour laboured heroically as a missionary from 1870 until his death at Tientsin in 1891,” noted the Glasgow Herald. “In his service he partook of the hard life of the race among whom he ministered, spending long periods afield among them, sharing their black-skin tents and unpalatable food, and suffering the rigours of the bitterly cold winters of the Mongolian plain.

“As a healer and a preacher he won great esteem among the native population and in his ministry made a marked impression in a land which was steeped in the superstitions of a degraded Lamaism.”

An article in the International Bulletin of Missionary Research in 2003 read: “Mongolia and the name James Gilmour will forever be linked in the minds of many people because of his books Among the Mongols and More About the Mongols, which are anthropological observations of Mongolian society as he observed it in the latter half of the 19th century.

“In 1883 one reviewer of Among the Mongols; wrote that it reminded him of Robinson Crusoe – yet Gilmour’s was a true story, reflecting his long years in Mongolia with the London Missionary Society.

Gilmour, the author added, had spent 20 years in Mongolia without making a convert, but to his great credit he had persisted with his task.

“Gilmour spared himself in nothing, but gave himself wholly to God,” one colleague is recorded as saying. “He kept nothing back. All was laid upon the altar.”