Jews as a distinct group date to the Yuan dynasty. Two Chinese scholars have argued that the Jews went to China in 998, because the Song History records that in the year 998, a monk (僧) named Ni-wei-ni (你尾尼:Nǐ wěi ní) and others had spent seven years traveling from India to China in order to pay homage to the Song Emperor Zhenzong. They identified this Ni-wei-ni as a Jewish rabbi. Others followed this up with a claim that the Song History provides a precise date for a large population of Jewish expatriates accompanying Ni-wei-ni from India who putatively arrived in Kaifeng on 20 February 998. These inferences contradict Buddhist records for Ni-wei-ni's visit. Both the sēng () used to describe Ni-wei-ni in the Song dynastic history and the shāmén () in the Buddha Almanac of Zhi-pan mean "Buddhist monk", not rabbi. Furthermore, Ni-wei-ni did not bring Western cloth with him, but banyan seeds. The earliest stele erected by the Kaifeng community bears the date 1489. This, it is affirmed, commemorates the construction in 1163 of a synagogue called Qingzhensi (清真寺:qīngzhēnsì, "True and pure Temple"), the customary term for mosques in China. The inscription states that the Jews came to China from Tiānzhú (天竺), a Han-Song term for India. It adds that they brought Western cloth as tribute for an emperor, unnamed, who welcomed them with the words:"You have come to Our China; reverence and preserve the customs of your ancestors, and hand them down at Bianliang (汴梁:Biànliáng)," i.e., Kaifeng. The same stone inscription also associates the building's establishment with two names: An-du-la (俺都喇:Ăndūlǎ perhaps 'Abdullah") and a certain Lieh-wei (列微:Liè wēi), probably transcribing Levi, who is described as the Wu-ssu-ta (五思達:Wǔsīdá) of the community. This last term probably is a phonetic rendering of the Persian word ustad, ("master", religious leader), and "rabbi" in a Jewish context in that language. At this time northern China was ruled by the Jurchan Jin dynasty (金朝:Jīncháo (1115–1234)), while the area south of the Yangtze river was controlled by the Southern Song. Irene Eber, among others, assumes that this context suggests that the Kaifeng Jews must have settled in this Song capital, then known as Bianjing, no later than 1120, some years before the Song-Jin alliance broke down. It was in 1127 during the subsequent Jin–Song Wars that Kaifeng was captured as a result of the Jingkang incident (靖康事變:Jìngkāng shìbiàn). By 1163, when the synagogue