Zhao Yingcheng

Origins and early life

Zhao Yingcheng, whose Hebrew name was Moshe ben Avraham, was born at Kaifeng in Henan in 1619 into the Jewish community of that city, the oldest and best documented in China, descended from traders who had reached it along the Silk Road centuries earlier, and he remained a Jew all his life while serving as an imperial official.

Work and career

He passed the jinshi degree, the highest of the imperial examinations, and rose in the Ming and then the early Qing administration to become a general and vice commissioner of surveillance in Fujian. In 1642 the Yellow River burst its dykes during the siege of Kaifeng, drowning much of the city; the synagogue was destroyed, the Torah scrolls were carried off by the water and the community was scattered. Zhao Yingcheng and his brother Zhao Yingdou brought the dispersed families back, financed the rebuilding of the synagogue out of his own means, completed in 1653, and organised the recovery and restoration of the damaged Torah scrolls, with a single surviving scroll used to copy the others.

A stone stele of 1663 in the synagogue compound records his role, and the historian Donald Leslie called him the most successful of the Kaifeng Jews in Chinese society. He wrote a work, now lost, on the history and doctrine of his community, and the stelae and the accounts of the Jesuit missionaries who visited Kaifeng remain the principal record of a Jewish community that kept the Torah in China for at least eight centuries.