Larson, Franz August

Childhood and Youth

Larson was the eleventh child in the family. His parents were poor tenants at the Hellby estate in Westmanland County. His father died when he was three years old, his mother when he was nine. Larson became a laborer at other tenants of the estate. He worked as a gardener, cattleman and stable; his love for horses remained with him for the rest of his life.

In 1887, Larson wanted to emigrate to Brazil , but his sister Edla persuaded him to wait for adulthood, but for now to work in a forge shop. When two years later he visited Edla in Stockholm , who married the general contractor, he decided that Larson should become an architect , and he began to work for him as a carpenter in order to prepare for an architectural education in Stockholm .

During this period, Larson, thanks to his sister, became interested in missionary work. He enrolled in a missionary school in Eskilstuna and ultimately preferred cooperation in the American Missionary Society, operating in Mongolia and China , to architectural education. Before leaving for Asia, Larson completed a six-week preparatory course in England .

First Mission to Mongolia

Larson was the first missionary of the Christian Missionary Alliance in Mongolia. In 1893 , at the age of 23, he arrived by sea in Tianjin , and from there, mostly on foot, to Beijing and Baotou . ^[2]

Larson was quite capable of learning the language. When he arrived in Ordos , the local prince gave him a teacher of the Mongolian language . As soon as Larson began to explain himself more or less tolerably, he went north, and a month later arrived in the capital of Khalkhi - Urga . After staying there for about a year, he returned to Inner Mongolia and settled in Kalgan . In 1897, he married an American missionary Mary Rogers from New York Albany . Taking advantage of the fact that Kalgan was at the crossroads of caravan trade, Larson met with many Europeans and Americans who visited the region, for example. with Swedish researcher Sven Gedin and Herbert Hoover , an American engineer on the construction of a railway from Beijing to the Khalkha border.

Due to the Boxer Uprising that broke out in China in 1900, Larson, together with his wife, two daughters and twenty other Swedish and American missionaries, was forced to flee to the Russian Empire , taking the pack animals allocated to him by the British consul in Beijing . Almost all the property he accumulated in Kalgan, including many years of work to create the Swedish-English-Mongolian dictionary, was destroyed. Working as a translator at a gold mine in Kyakhta , Larson saved up enough money and after a few months on the Trans-Siberian Railway reached the Grand Duchy of Finland , from there he moved to Sweden and then, across the Atlantic, to the USA , to Albany .

Second Mission to Mongolia

A year later, Larson returned to Kyakhta and became a translator with the Swedish engineers Olivekrona and Lagerholm, who worked on the construction of the railway to Beijing through Urga. However, when the project was curtailed, he turned to the British Missionary Society, inviting him to become their representative in Mongolia. In 1902, Larson and his wife went to Kalgan with four Mongol escorts and ten camels, loaded with bibles , which they simultaneously distributed to the Mongols.

Over the course of 12 years of Bible distribution in Mongolia, Larson made contacts with many representatives of the Mongolian elite, including Prince Handdorj and Foreign Minister Tserendorzh , as well as Bogdo-gegan VIII himself , who was helped to get the Ford T model " . Bogdo-khan granted Larson the princely title ( Mong. Gүn ) and the Order of the Precious Rod ; ^[3] and remained his friend until his death in 1924 . After the Xinhai Revolution of 1911, the President of the Republic of China, Yuan Shikai, appointed him his own adviser on Mongolian affairs and sought his mediation to conclude an agreement with Mongolia, which declared independence, and stop the outbreak of war on the Inner Mongolian borderlands, but Larson’s efforts in this direction did not bring success. This forced Larson to resign after two years of service, but he was still awarded 36 thousand Chinese dollars, which was approximately equivalent to his salary for three years.

Leaving Urga, Larson returned to Kalgan, where he founded a stud farm, which supplied horses to races in Beijing , Shanghai and Tianjin ; in 1917 became a co-owner of the Danish-American trading house " Anderson & Mayer ". In 1923, he founded his own business, F.A. Larson and Co. , with offices in Kalgan and Urga.

Expeditions

During the time spent in Mongolia, Larson led several scientific expeditions several times. The first, planned by the British consul in Beijing Campbell and postponed due to the Boxer Uprising, took place in 1902 . In 1923, he was hired by the American paleontologist R. C. Andrews , who was looking for dinosaur remains in the Gobi Desert . In gratitude for the labors, Larson was promoted to the honorary staff of the New York American Museum of Natural History . ^[4] In 1927, the largest joint expedition of Gedin and Larson took place, during which the latter was responsible for logistics , performing tasks such as providing the expedition with 300 camels, 26 Mongol tents ( Mong. Mayhan ), and for the annual supply of 65 of its members. ^[5]

During a visit to Sweden in 1929, Larson made an offer for investment in China to the largest Swedish industrialist Ivar Krueger . Kruger agreed in principle, and Larson began developing a project for a railway network connecting Nanjing , Urumqi and Novosibirsk . Larson almost managed to get the agreement of the Chinese government, but with the death of Kruger in 1932, the project had to be abandoned.

A few years later, the new Chinese president, Chiang Kai-shek, tried through Larson to persuade the Swedish Foreign Ministry to send military instructors to train troops bordering the Mongolian People's Republic , but the Swedish consul in Shanghai rejected the offer without even sending the project to Stockholm.

The last years of life

With the invasion of the Japanese Empire in China in 1939, Larson again lost most of his property and left for California to his wife and then to Sweden, where he became a co-owner of a mink nursery. With the outbreak of World War II, it became impossible to maintain the trucks necessary for the nursery, and Larson sold it and then returned to the United States , Alabama , where one of his brothers lived. There he acquired a chicken farm, but after three years he decided to move to California and moved the business there. After the death of his wife in 1950, Larson sold the house and left for his homeland. There, with the assistance of East American journalist Nora Walne, who specialized in the East, he wrote the memoirs “ Larson, Duke of Mongolia ” ( English; Larson, Duke of Mongolia ; came out in Sweden under the title “Mongolia and my life among the Mongols”; Swedish. “Mongoliet och mitt liv bland mongolerna " ). A year later he left for Canada , where he settled on about. Vancouver also helped establish the affairs of the recently immigrated Swedish family. During a visit to his daughter in California, Larson died at the age of 87. He was buried in the cemetery of the California city of Altaden .

• Protestantism in Mongolia

• Larson, Frans August Larson Duke of Mongolia (Boston: Little, Brown, and Co. 1930)
• Odelberg, Axel Hertig Larson. Äventyrare, missionär, upptäckare (Stockholm: Wahlström & Widstrand. 2003)

• Christian & Missionary Alliance - Official Site