The first formal meeting of the Society was held in October 1922 in the home of Albert James Brace, a Canadian Methodist missionary and Master of the Szechwan Lodge No.

[7] The purpose of the Journal was to report on the "investigations into the country, peoples, customs and environment of West China, especially as they affect the non-Chinese", and to promote the study of "the life and customs, the religion and sociology, the enthology and anthropology, and other problems related to the various aboriginal races that inhabit the border lands of Western China".

Members of the Society were expected to travel at least once every three years, into the tribal regions, and to there investigate some phase of the life of the district.

[8] But due to the increasing state of lawlessness and banditry and the difficulty in travelling into these border regions, the scope of the Society's activities was enlarged to include the study of all problems peculiar to the land and life of Western China, either Chinese or Aboriginal.

[9] Significant contributors included James Huston Edgar, author of numerous articles especially concerning the Tibetan region; David Crockett Graham, who did research on the Chuan Miao people and the 1937 volume is largely devoted to his studies of this group;[4] Thomas Torrance, who was particularly interested in the Qiang people; Vyvyan Donnithorne, who wrote a long article for Volume VI (1933–1934) detailing his investigation on the East Syriac Christian tradition in Guanghan (Hanchow);[10] and W. Brian Harland's "On the Physiographical History of Western Szechwan" for the 1945 volume.