Rhadanites used both routes. Some evidence has been interpreted to suggest that their ancestors may have mostly hailed from the Bukharan Jewish branch of Persian Jews who had settled in Central Asia. In all likelihood, all of the founders of the community were male Jewish merchants: the arduous, dangerous nature of the route, and the length of time which they needed to spend in order to travel on it, would have probably forced them to rule out bringing their wives, and after they settled in Kaifeng, they married Chinese women. With regard to this first wave, among the vast trove of documents which Aurel Stein discovered in Dunhuang in Gansu, northwestern China, was a bill of sale for sheep which dated back to 718 CE, written in Judeo-Persian with Hebrew characters, they wrote their documents on paper, something which was unavailable in the West, together with a fragment of a Seliḥoth which was probably composed in the eighth or ninth century. A century later, the Arab geographer Abū Zayd Ḥasan al-Sīrāfī mentioned (910) a massacre which occurred in Canton in 878/9 in which not only Muslims and Christians but Jews were also killed, attesting to the latter group's presence in China. Trade with China was predominantly maritime, and dominated by Arabs, with many Jews also engaged in this network. By the 11th century, more than a million Arabs lived in port enclaves, where they were allowed self-administration. At least 7 synagogue communities are attested for this period in all major Chinese port cities, such as Yangzhou, Ningbo and Hangzhou. Goods from these coastal centres were transported inland via the Grand Canal to the Yellow River and then by barge to Kaifeng. The Jewish community that was eventually established in Kaifeng survived the collapse of these sister communities on the eastern seaboard, all of which disappeared in the 15-16th centuries when the Ming dynasty's ability to protect its coast was crippled by constant raiding from Japanese pirates. The Song/Yuan period hypotheses The point of departure for determining precisely when a community (kehillah) was established relies on two forms of evidence: the information surviving in inscriptions from four stelae recovered from Kaifeng, and references in Chinese dynastic sources. The dates on the stelae range from 1489 through 1512 and 1663 to 1679. Chinese documents on Jews are rare compared to the voluminous records of other peoples. The first official documents referring to