Word: sultanates
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There is probably no finer house in Malaya than Bukit Serene (peaceful hill), the green-tiled granite palace of the Sultan of Johore. But the Sultan has never occupied Bukit Serene. Four years ago he was persuaded to let it indefinitely to Malcolm MacDonald, the British commissioner general in Southeast Asia, at a nominal rent-just enough to pay the wages of the palace's 37 gardeners...
...Sultan, an old Oxonian, had no reason, especially in his personal history, to like British officials, or planters, or Singapore's British businessmen. They had not openly objected to his marriage back in 1930 to Scottish-born Helen Wilson (after he had shed an unspecified number of Moslem wives, and she had shed a husband who happened to be the Sultan's personal physician), but they left him in no doubt about their views of his method of divorcing Helen. In the traditional Moslem manner, the Sultan called it off by saying "Talak [I divorce you]" the required...
Most Damnable. The British also reacted haughtily about Lydia Hill, the English showgirl the Sultan met in London's Grosvenor House in 1934. He brought Lydia to Johore with a flashing diamond on her left hand, but the British sahibs refused to accept her. The Sultan's reply: he ordered his gardeners to plant shrubs all over the sahibs' golf course, which was, after all, his own property. In time, the Sultan sent her back to England, and there Lydia was killed in an air raid in the act of buying a fur coat. The Sultan...
Three of its seven divisions promptly revolted against the Sultan Defense Minister while-to avoid charges of mutiny-professing continued allegiance to the chief of state, President Achmad Soekarno. Regiments fought within themselves and against each other...
Confronted with this rebellion, the weak government fired the Sultan's pros, promoted the insurgents, and virtually handed them the army. Overwhelmed by futility, the Sultan last week resigned. History, he said, would judge whether he had been right...