Doris Ekblad-Olson, Xu Deli in Chinese, was a Swedish American missionary who served for 44 years in Hong Kong, from 1953 to 1997.
Doris Ekblad was born in the USA in 1930, she spent three childhood years in Inner Mongolia where her parents were missionaries to the Chinese. At the age of five, she knew God was calling her also to be a missionary to the Chinese. When her mother died of meningitis, her father Knute Hjalmar Ekblad, sent her and her brother Paul back to the U.S. alone by ship, while he stayed behind, because, he said, "There aren't enough people here to tell them about Jesus."
Doris was six when she and Paul returned to the USA to be brought up by their aunt, but Doris promised to herself one day she would return to help her father.
In 1938, father returned on furlough and the family was reunited. Knute Ekblad married for a third time and they settled on a farm in Grantsburg, Wisconsin. As well as farming, he pastored a local Free Church.
At 17, Miss Ekblad attended Bible School at the Free Church Bible Institute, Chicago, and finished her missionary training at Wheaton College, Il. At 21, she was accepted for missionary work by the Free Church Bible Institute, and in September 1953, she sailed to Hong Kong to begin her first four-year missionary term.
Once there, senior missionary Rev Arthur Lindquist offered Miss Ekblad his house (House #2) on Cheung Chau, which she accepted*.
She was delighted to find early neighbours on the island were the Stuart Gunzels, fellow missionaries from Inner Mongolia years before. They were there with four Mongolian scholars revising a translation of the Mongolian New Testament. The Hong Kong Bible Society printed 8000 copies.
When Miss Ekblad moved in, her first task was to learn Cantonese. A village man with some experience in language teaching was employed to instruct her in Cantonese for three hours each day, five days a week, although his English was limited.
The mission arranged for a village lady, Ah-Fan, to purchase food and cook for her, enabling her to concentrate on language study during the day, and ensuring she wasn’t alone the whole time. However, Ah-Fan spoke a different dialect from the one she was learning, which caused initial difficulties when the same meal was served up three times a day!
After nine months on the island, on her own in the week and on the mainland at weekends, the mission found accommodation for Miss Ekblad with a missionary family in Hong Kong.
The first four years in Hong Kong were taken up with learning the language, and helping in local churches with Sunday School, and particularly with the large youth group at the Grace Evangelical Free Church in Kowloon.
During her second four-year term, Miss Ekblad revived a flagging Free Church youth magazine, Children’s Friend. She visited and spoke at schools, sharing true stories from the magazine, and demand ramped up.
Eighteen months in, she came down with undulant fever and had to repatriate in 1960, but it meant she was home for some important family events. Sadly, her stepmother died of heart failure and her father went into hospital with heart issues. It was two years before Miss Ekblad was fit enough to return to Hong Kong.
By her third term, she was teaching part-time in the Evangel Bible Seminary in Kowloon. Her subjects were English, Inductive Evangelism and Biblical Studies. By using her furloughs to complete her M Div degree back home, she was able to begin teaching full-time in the early 70s, her favourite subjects being the Old Testament and Personal Evangelism. This was to last through 35 years. Teachers and students of the Evangel Theological Seminary came to affectionately refer to her as Wonder Woman.
During these years, the Evangel Bible Seminary was badly needing funding to expand to meet a growing need. The problem was that the churches in America were expecting the Free Churches in Hong Kong to finance it, and the Free Churches in Hong Kong, who were just not up to it, were looking to the Free Churches in America to do it. It became a matter for urgent prayer. Then a wealthy Hong Kong Christian businessman appeared and offered to fund all the changes needed. These were completed with great celebrations in 1973.
In 1979, when China opened up its borders to outsiders, Miss Ekblad was able to fulfill a long-felt need to visit her old home in Inner Mongolia. In 1982, she went with friends Asta Nelsen and Olia Simeonson and her son, and they were delighted to find a lively Christian church of 1000 and friends they had known 46 years previously. They found that wherever Knute Ekblad had preached, there was a thriving church.
Miss Ekblad returned twice more, in 1987 and 1991. She was able to take Bibles in Mongolian and found in one place that a group of 10 Christians had grown to some 28,000 in over 70 churches. Realising the great need for Bibles, she managed to get reprints of the Gunzels’ translation and sent them into the country via Germany.
In 1994 Miss Ekblad travelled to Thailand, Australia, and Singapore, holidaying, ministering and meeting the Chinese community and ex-Hong Kong friends.
In 1997, after serving for 44 years in Hong Kong, Miss Ekblad retired to the USA to the Covenant Village, Denver, Colorado, but her ministry to the Chinese continued wherever she was. She continued to travel to Hong Kong for speaking engagements.
She got involved in a big project to produce a colloquial translation of the Mongolian New Testament, which was completed in 2000. It took another year to get the translation confirmed.
In 2002, she visited Hong Kong for fundraising to print the New Testament. That same year she became engaged to Dr Vernon Olson, whom she had known many years earlier. Instead of wedding gifts, Miss Ekblad and Dr Olson asked for donations towards the printing of the Bibles. To their amazement, over $24,000 came in, enough for 10,000 copies to be printed.
The colloquial Mongolian New Testament was printed in 2003. Means were found to get them all to Mongolia, but then there were requests for thousands more. Again, more prayer was made, and a Mongolian publisher, who had read a copy of the New Testament and come to faith, then spoke up and offered to continue printing them in Mongolia at a much-reduced cost.
After that, someone managed to put the translation on the internet for any Mongolian, anywhere, with a computer, to read. In the first two years, it had over 250,000 hits.
Also in 2003 came Miss Ekblad’s wedding, which came as a result of an acquaintance made 40 years earlier! Like her, Vernon Olson had a Swedish heritage, but they both found they had much more in common, and not just their Evangelical Free Church faith. He had a farming upbringing, had pastored new churches (Doris had church planted), and had taught in four colleges and four seminaries around the world, one of which had been the Evangel Seminary HK, at a time when Doris was away.
Miss Ekblad gained a husband she hadn’t prayed for, and an instant family of five children and eighteen grandchildren.
In their retirement in the Covenant Village, Denver, Doris and Vernon Olson continued a joint ministry to the Chinese community at home and abroad.
Doris Ekblad-Olson died in 2025, aged 94.
*In her book, the author calls it House #23, but her description of the path 'from the village buildings on the waterfront up a steep hill' fits House #2. However, she also says the house had a flat roof, but Houses #2 and #23 both had a pitched roof. All photographs of the houses show a pitched roof. The author also gives some interesting information about the house plumbing, which can be applied to other European Houses built at that time.
Doris Ekblad-Olson Picture
Source: Any Bush Will Do by Doris Ekblad-Olson, (still available).
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