KAI-FUNG, or K'AI-FENG-FU, krfung' fi7115'. A walled city of China, capital of the Prov ince of Ho-nan (q.v.), 11 miles south of the Ho ang-ho or Yellow- River and about 450 miles southwest of Peking (Map: China, 1) 5). It was the capital of the country from 960 to 1129, and was then known as Pien-liang. a name still fre quently applied to it. It covers a considerable area; its most noticeable feature is a 13-story pagoda of brown glazed brick. The sub urbs. where the business is mostly done, are large, and have a large transit trade with Fan-ch(•ig and other ports on the Han River. Kai-fung is a station on the new Hanko• Peking Railway. which is now building. Popula tion, about 100,000. The city has been over whelmed fourteen times by flood, nine times by earthquake, six times by fire. and eleven times taken by assault. It was unsuccessfully besieged by the Tai-ping rebels. In 1642 it was inundated by its own friends. having been besieged for six months by 100,000 rebels. The general who came to its relief conceived the idea of raising the siege by laying the surrounding country under water. With this end in view he broke down the embankments by which the Yellow River is kept in its course (the bottom of the river being higher than the surrounding country), and. while he succeeded in drowning the rebels.
the city was overwhelmed and 300,000 of the inhabitants drowned. Here are found the rem nants of a colony of Jews who entered China during the Han dynasty or earlier. They were discovered in the seventeenth. century by the Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci. In 1164 they had built a fine synagogue, with Imperial per mission, hut in the numerous disasters which have overtaken the city and several others which had followed were ruined, and now little remains but debris to mark its site. They were visited in 1850 by a native Christian deputa tion, sent by the Bishop of Hong Kong, and Dr. Medhunt. of the London Missionary Society, who obtained some of their Hebrew Scriptures and transcribed two of their historical tablets which still remained. When they were visited later the remaining rolls of the Law were pur chased. They had taken to eating pork, however, and they are now scarcely distinguishable from the Chinese population. They were known as the Tiao Kin II wuy (•the sect which plucks out the sinew'), in allusion to a well-known Jewish cus tom.