He was born in Forfarshire,[1] the third son of a local church minister, William Hamilton Burns (1779–1859) and Elizabeth Chalmers (1784–1879).

[2][3] At the age of seventeen, Burns's faith was strengthened through tragedy, and he subsequently commenced theological training at Marischal College in Aberdeen,[4] and at the University of Glasgow's Divinity Hall.

[7] He began his missionary service during the late Qing dynasty in British Hong Kong and went on to preach in such locations as Shantou, Xiamen and Beijing.

Taylor, however, influenced Burns in the way in which he sought to contextualize his ministry by breaking with missionary tradition to wear Chinese clothing while evangelizing in China's interior.

During his twenty years of preaching the gospel in China, Burns also spent a short period wrongly imprisoned in Guangzhou.