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About Theo Sørensen
- Theodor August Christian Sørensen (25 May 1873 – 2 September 1959) was a Norwegian missionary known for his work in Tibet. He was born in Kristiansand as the son of a carpenter.
- He experienced a religious revival in 1891, and joined the Salvation Army.
- From 1892 to 1894 he attended a bible school in the United Kingdom.
- He then went to British India with the Tibetan Pioneer Mission, settled near the Tibetan border and undertook studies of its language and religions together with Edvard Amundsen.
- He wanted to travel within Tibet, but as this was rejected by the British colonial power, he moved to Chengdu, Chinese Empire in 1896.
- Here he studied the Chinese language, and proclaimed that learning Chinese was a "delight" compared to Tibetan.
- From 1899 to 1923 he lived and worked for the China Inland Mission in Kangding, Sichuan.He did not particularly succeed as a missionary, but conducted several longer travels in Eastern Tibet and became known for collecting Tibetan scripture.
- Among others, he found a series of written sheets in the ruins of a monastery.
- Upon returning to Norway in 1923, he donated a 314-volume collection of Tibetan Buddhist canon to the University of Kristiania.
- The texts particularly pertained to Bön and Nyingma schools of Tibetan Buddhism.For his contribution, Sørensen was declared a Fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute in 1922 and the Royal Geographical Society in 1923.
- In 1953 he was proclaimed Knight, First Class of the Royal Norwegian Order of St.
- Olav.
- He lived the rest of his life in Norway, except for the years 1925 to 1936 which he spent in Peking.
- He had married fellow missionary Cecilie "Cissi" Rasmussen (1870–1955) in March 1904 in Leshan.
- Also, he rejoined the Church of Norway in 1924.
- He died in September 1959 in Kristiansand.
- In 2009, his grandniece donated another set of scriptures to the University of Oslo.
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