符励恺 · 1862 – 1939 · Swedish
Erik Folke (Chinese name Fu Likai, 符励恺) was born on 7 July 1862 at Björkasbo in Folkärna parish, Kopparberg County, Sweden; his father was a freeholding farmer. He graduated from the Fjellstedt School in 1885. In 1887 he did something without precedent in Swedish mission history: with no large mission sending him and no steady support, he set off alone for China at his own expense. Before this, no Swedish mission had yet sent anyone to China (only a few individual Swedes had come with foreign missions, such as Theodore Hamberg, who came with the Basel Mission in 1847); he became the pioneer of that road.
At first his work was supported only by a small committee and was simply called the "Erik Folke Mission". Soon the name was changed to the Swedish Mission in China (Svenska Missionen i Kina, today the Evangelical East Asia Mission). Its fields were in the three provinces of Shaanxi, Shanxi and Henan, and it kept close contact with the China Inland Mission, whose network in the region gave the young Swedish mission practical support. It should be noted that the Swedish Mission in China and the Swedish Mission Covenant (Svenska Missionsförbundet), whose Chinese name is similar, were two separate missions; the latter's fields were in Hubei and in Kashgar, Xinjiang, and the two are often confused.
In 1889 he married the missionary Anna Kristina Gran; she died in 1906. In 1908 he married another missionary, Mimmi Beskow, a sister of the well-known Swedish theologian Natanael Beskow. In the meantime he made two brief visits home, in 1893 and 1901; from 1904 to 1917 he worked for a long period in Sweden itself, after which he went back to China, ending his missionary career in 1920.
He was also a translator and writer, working in both directions. He translated Laozi's Tao Te Ching and the writings of Zhuangzi into Swedish, and in 1922 published Tänkare i det gamla Kina (Thinkers of Ancient China), introducing pre-Qin Chinese thought to Nordic readers. At the same time he wrote in Chinese: he wrote histories of the Old and New Testaments and translated Martin Luther's On the Freedom of a Christian and the Augsburg Confession into Chinese. His Chinese name appears on one of them: the woodblock edition of his New Testament History (Hong Kong, 1923) gives the author as "Shuei-tien mu-shï Fu-li-k'ai" ("Pastor Fu Likai of Sweden"). This site writes the name 符励恺 according to that reading; the characters used in the original book have yet to be checked. A farmer's son who had made his own way into inland China at his own expense ended up as a carrier between two cultures.
After returning to Sweden in 1921 he became general secretary of the Swedish Mission in China, moving from the field to the leadership of the mission. He died on 18 August 1939, aged 77. In 1962 his home village of Björkasbo, where he was born, put up a memorial stone to him. His son Harald Folke later also served with the Swedish Mission in China.