Name Khalid Sheldrake | ||
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Khalid Sheldrake, born Bertram William Sheldrake (born 1888, date of death unknown) was an English pickle manufacturer who converted to Islam and briefly declared himself king of Islamistan in the Xinjiang region of China during the Warlord era.
Biography
Sheldrake, dubbed by the British press in the mid-1930s as "The Suburban King of Tartary", was the son of a pickle magnate, changed his name to Khalid upon his conversion to Islam. Sheldrake was active in the British Muslim community, and established a branch of the Western Islamic Association in South Shields in 1930.
A series of rebellions among the mostly Muslim population of Xinjiang in the early 1930s led to a loss of control over the region by the Republic of China, and the establishment of several short-lived Islamic states, among them the First East Turkestan Republic and the Khotan Emirate. In 1934, the new emirs of Khotan supposedly invited Sheldrake, who was in Peking at the time studying the conditions of the Muslims living there, to become the new head of state. Sheldrake accepted and declared himself the king of Islamistan, which was to span the area of Xinjiang but he never visited western China. However, later that same year, the Soviet-backed forces of Sheng Shicai (ηδΈζ) re-established Chinese control over the region by which time Sheldrake had returned to Britain.