Departures of note

In 1931, Ignatius Timothy Trebitsch-Lincoln, a Hungarian-born former British Member of Parliament and convicted fraudster, rose to the rank of abbot in Shanghai, where he established his own Buddhist monastery under the name Chao Kung. All initiates were required to hand over their possessions to him. After the death of the 13th Dalai Lama, he proclaimed himself the new Dalai Lama, a claim supported by the Japanese but rejected by the Tibetans.

Born Ignácz Trebitsch in 1879 to an Orthodox Jewish family in Paks, Hungary, he fled abroad in 1897 after trouble with police over petty theft. In London, he converted to Christianity, was baptized on Christmas Day 1899, and studied at a Lutheran seminary in Germany. He was sent to Canada as a missionary, first for the Presbyterians and then the Anglicans, before returning to England in 1903 after a quarrel over his stipend. He became Tribich Lincoln by deed poll in 1904 and secured British naturalisation in 1909.

With the support of Liberal Party member Seebohm Rowntree, he was nominated as the Liberal candidate for Darlington in 1909, despite still being a Hungarian citizen. In the January 1910 general election, he beat the sitting Unionist member Herbert Pease, but lost the seat in the November 1910 election. Unpaid as an MP and facing financial troubles, he turned to failed commercial ventures, including an attempt to make money in the oil industry in Bucharest. After offering his services as a spy to the British government and being rejected, he contacted the Germans, who employed him as a double agent. He sold his story to the New York World Magazine and published Revelations of an International Spy in 1916. The British government tracked him down via the Pinkerton agency, and he was returned to England on a charge of fraud, serving three years in Parkhurst Prison before being deported in 1919.

In Weimar Germany, he worked his way into the extreme right-wing fringe, meeting Wolfgang Kapp and Erich Ludendorff. During the Kapp Putsch in 1920, he was appointed press censor to Kapp's provisional government, and in that capacity met Adolf Hitler. After the Putsch collapsed, he fled to Vienna and Budapest, linking up with a loose alliance of monarchists and reactionaries known as the White International. Entrusted with the organization's archives, he sold the information to various governments' secret services. Tried and acquitted on a charge of high treason in Austria, he was deported again. In 1926, his 23-year-old son John was hanged for murder, and Trebitsch-Lincoln's desperate journey from Ceylon to see him before his execution proved in vain. He died of stomach trouble in Shanghai in 1943, aged 64.