Again, Chao Kung

A "man no country wants," for most of his 60 years, has been Ignatius Timothy Trebitsch Lincoln. In his day he has been accused of enough dark deeds to get a whole portfolio of Oppenheim characters hung. Born a Hungarian Jew. he added the Lincoln to his name, he said, in admiration for the Great Emancipator. He went to England, somehow became a Presbyterian missionary, turned himself into an Anglican curate, made himself a Quaker when he was secretary to Quaker B. Seebohm Rowntree (cocoa). Trebitsch Lincoln, before World War I, got himself elected M. P. for Darlington, was accused in a secret session of Parliament of being a spy. Later it was rumored he had spied for both the Allies and Germany. He made his way to the U. S., was extradited to England, where he was convicted of forgery, imprisoned until the war's end. Then he went to Germany, helped in the abortive Kapp Putsch of 1920.

Trebitsch Lincoln drifted eastward, intriguing with French and Czech agents on the way, turned up in China, where for a time he seemed to be close to the late Warlord Wu Pei-fu. About the time his son was executed in England for murdering a brewer's assistant, Trebitsch Lincoln became a Buddhist. He had his bullet pate shaved and branded with the twelve circular symbols of the Buddhist wheel of life, took the name of Chao Kung. He made a trip to Germany (where he was jailed for an old debt), later accumulated some white followers, kept on the move. In 1938, he turned up again in Shanghai, with a beard and a new program. He was now for Japan, or, as he blandly put it: "I am still pro-Chinese and therefore pro-Japanese."

In Shanghai last week this aging adventurer sounded off once more. Chao Kung called upon the Governments of Great Britain, France, Germany and Russia to resign simultaneously as prelude to a peace conference. Otherwise, he darkly predicted, "the Tibetan Buddhist supreme masters, without prejudice, pre-direction or favor, will unchain forces and powers whose very existence is unknown to you and against whose operations you are consequently helpless."

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