CHINA: Murdered Moslems

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Four thousand dead Moslems could cover a U. S. football field with corpses three deep. A field outside the walls of a city in China's most inland province was so covered one day last August. News, apparently authentic, came last week to modernized Hankow from missionaries.

For months has fled from village to village the tale of a terror—the massacre of Moslems—30,000, 40,000, 50,000. Facts appear as follows:

Last May, Mohammedan villagers in the Tao-chow-ting district of Kansu province rebelled against omnivorous Chinese tax-gatherers, rioted, killed 700 Chinese women and children.

Last July two divisions of ragged Nationalist troops swept through Tao-chow-ting on shaggy Chinese horses, burning, shooting. Three thousand fear-crazed Mohammedans were killed. Hundreds of other Moslems, fleeing along the Hsiat-sang valley toward Tibet were shot down by Tibetan frontier guards.

In August the governor of Kansu declared an amnesty. A long and dusty caravan of Mohammedans flocked back to their homes in Tao-chow-ting. At the city gates fur-hatted sentries with long Russian rifles turned all the men from 15 to 50 aside, ordered them to go to a distant field where they would be given food for their families. At the field hidden machine guns leaped, sparked and rattled. Three thousand men milled like sheep, were shot down in their tracks. Terrified Moslem women, hearing the gunfire, rushed from the city gates, hysterically committed suicide by the bleeding bodies of their husbands and brothers.