Photographs made by Robert Brainerd Ekvall and Betty Ekvall while missionaries on the China-Tibet border. The photographs document Tibetan, Chinese, and Vietnamese people, ceremonies, dances and musicians, shrines, traders, boats, towns, agriculture, and scenery. The collection also includes images of the Ekvalls and other missionaries and a map of Gansu province from the Christian and Missionary Alliance newsletter.
Robert Brainerd Ekvall (1898-1978) and Betty Ekvall were missionaries for the Christian and Missionary Alliance in the Tibetan Plateau on the China-Tibet border. Robert Ekvall was born in Gangsu province, China, to parents who were among the first Christian and Missionary Alliance missionaries in Tibet. After his father's death, Ekvall returned to the United States with his mother. He attended Wheaton Academy and Wheaton College, graduating in 1920. In 1921, Ekvall married fellow Wheaton alumnus Martha Elizabeth Fischer (commonly known as Betty) and both attended the Nyack Missionary Institute. The next year they left for China, where Robert taught at the Bible school. They also traveled into Tibet to establish a mission station in Ngawa. In 1927, the Ekvalls returned to the United States due to political turmoil in China, though they went back to China the following year. On another furlough in the U.S., Robert Ekvall did some graduate work in anthropology at the University Chicago. The Ekvalls returned to Tibet, where Betty Ekvall died of illness in 1940. In 1941, Robert Ekvall traveled to Indochina where their son, David, was doing missionary work; he returned to the United States in 1944 and joined the United States Army in Burma and China. He later published books, articles, and poems on Tibet and China, and taught at the University of Washington.
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Photo Lot 2003-12, Robert Brainerd Ekvall and Betty Ekvall photographs of Tibet and Indochina, National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution
Donated by Elizabeth S. Schober, Betty Ekvall's niece, and transferred to the archives by Schober's daughter Candace Greene, Department of Anthropology, in 2002.
The Billy Graham Center Archives at Wheaton College holds the oral history interviews, correspondence, photographs, and a manuscript by Ekvall (CN 092).
The Newark Museum holds some Tibetan material from Ekvall.
Inventory available in the repository.