Jeremiah Heaton of Virginia has planted a flag and claimed an 800-square-mile patch of desert land in Egypt as a kingdom for his daughter who wants to be a princess, according to a report in the WashingtonPost.

Planting a flag and claiming ownership is exactly how several other countries, including what became the U.S., were historically claimed, Heaton said. The main difference is that those historical cases of imperialism were acts of war while his was an act of love, he said.

“I founded the nation in love for my daughter,” Heaton said.

A father of three, Heaton works in the mining industry. He is former emergency services director for a local county. He said he didn’t want to make false promises to daughter Emily, then 6, when she told him she wanted to be a princess. But he said yes anyway.

“As a parent you sometimes go down paths you never thought you would,” Heaton told the WashingtonPost.

Within months of his promise, Heaton to a desolate area of Southern Egypt into an unclaimed 800-square-mile part of the desert. On June 16, Emily’s seventh birthday, he planted a blue flag designed by his children with a crown and four stars on a rocky hill. The area along the Sudanese border is known by locals as Bir Tawil. Heaton and his family call it the “Kingdom of North Sudan.”

Heaton says he is king of the area — because he says so — and Emily is princess.

“I wanted to show my kids I will literally go to the ends of the earth to make their wishes and dreams come true,” Heaton said.

Heaton says his claim over Bir Tawil is legitimate. He argues that planting the flag makes it so.

Heaton ran for Congress in Virginia’s 9th district in 2012 and lost. He said he plans to ask the African Union for help in formally establishing the Kingdom of North Sudan and said that he is confident they will welcome him. Representatives from Sudanese and Egyptian embassies in Washington declined to comment Saturday.

Heaton will need legal recognition from the U.N. and neighboring countries, or other groups to actually get political control of the land, said Sheila Carapico, a professor of political science and international studies at the University of Richmond, according to a Bristol Herald Courier interview.

After he promised his daughter that she could be a princess, Heaton did an online search for unclaimed land globally. When focusing his search on the Latin term “terra nullius,” meaning “land belonging to no one,” Heaton stumbled across information on Bir Tawil. He said a border dispute between Sudan and Egypt had left the land as unclaimed territory. It lies about halfway between Egypt’s coast along the Red Sea and the place where the Nile crosses into Sudan,  WashingtonPost reports.

“I founded the nation in love for my daughter,” Heaton said.

He asked Egyptian authorities for permission to travel to the remote, unpopulated piece of sand, and told them why. At first, he said even he was skeptical of his plan.

“I was fearful of going into a toxic environment,” Heaton said.

With permission, Heaton spent a few days in Egypt before arriving at Bir Tawil. The trip changed his perspectives on the Egyptian people, he said.

“I cannot stress how kind and generous the Egyptian people are,” Heaton said.

Heaton says he hopes to foster positive relationships with Sudan and Egypt by converting his “kingdom” into an agricultural production center. It’s what his children, especially Emily, want, he said.