In 1887, a Scottish missionary and a group of Korean merchants sat together in Shenyang, translating the New Testament into Korean. Reverend John Ross, a native Gaelic speaker, arrived in Manchuria in 1872. Because imperial law forbade churches inside the city walls, he purchased land just beyond the East Gate in 1888. By October 1889, a towering sanctuary stood there, capable of seating 800 worshippers.

Fire consumed the structure during the Boxer Rebellion in 1900. The congregation rebuilt the sanctuary in 1907 using Boxer Indemnity funds. They laid traditional blue bricks to form a Western-style facade. The kiln-fired masonry absorbed the shockwaves of the twentieth century, standing quietly when the doors were forced shut during the Cultural Revolution.

When Ross died in Scotland in 1915, grieving congregants carved a stone plaque measuring 1.6 by 1 meters and embedded it directly into the plaster of the central pulpit wall. For decades, worshippers navigated a muddy, two-meter-wide alleyway through a dense cluster of low-slung houses to reach the entrance. The city cleared those cramped surroundings in 2007, laying down a wide green space for the reconstructed building's centennial.

Today, the 1907 blue-brick sanctuary anchors a massive religious complex. The John Ross Memorial Hall sits to the right of the main building. It holds the physical remnants of a Scottish Presbyterian who gave the Korean peninsula its first translated Bible, leaving a permanent mark on the spiritual geography of East Asia.