CHINA: Sheldrake's Islamistan

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No more outlandish than everything else in the mountain-walled bowl of sand between China, Russia and India was Dr. Khalid Sheldrake, Moslem medical missionary to Moslems who started life as the son of a British pickle manufacturer. Last winter several tribal chiefs from Chinese Turkistan, where every tribe hates and fears every other tribe, called on Dr. Sheldrake in his Peiping hotel and invited him to be their overlord. The red-fezzed, toothbrush-mustached Briton accepted and announced that he was King of the entire Chinese province of Sinkiang, of some 3,000,000 Moslem, Buddhist, Confucianist, Taoist souls speaking Turkish, Russian, Chinese and Persian. Sweeping clean, he announced that the name of his new kingdom was "Islamistan."

When his plump-cheeked wife got the news in the London suburb of Forest Hill, she gave regal audience to newshawks: "I intend to take my responsibilities as Queen seriously. My two sons are excited at the idea that they are now Princes." But before the royal family could get to the coronation city of Khotan on the southern rim of the Taklamakan Desert, the troops of General Shen Shih-tsai, young Chinese provincial governor, swooped down on King Khalid with planes furnished by Soviet Russia. Last week a brief dispatch from the sand bowl disposed of the pickle maker's ambitious son: "Provincial troops overthrew the insurgent Moslem forces of Dr. Khalid Sheldrake. He was reported to have fled in defeat toward India, following the wholesale surrender of his troops."