While the first written evidence of Jewish life in in China dates to the late 8th century CE, Jews may have first settled there in the centuries before the Common Era, following the Babylonian exile. In the modern era, a Chinese Jewish community once flourished, but by the 19th century it was rapidly shrinking, in part due to increasing assimilation. It was then that Christian missionaries acquired a rare local Torah scroll, now found in the British Library, as Ilana Tahan writes:
Historians concur that one of the oldest Jewish communities in China is K’ae-fung-foo (Kaifeng), on the banks of the Yellow River, in the province of Henan, which was founded by Jewish traders who settled there by the mid-10th century. Kaifeng had been the thriving capital of the emperors of the Song Dynasty, who ruled China for 166 years beginning in 960 CE.
[T]wo Chinese Christians, . . . in November 1850, were dispatched to Kaifeng on a mission of inquiry by the London Society for the Promotion of Christianity among Jews. . . . The main purpose of the expedition was to establish contact with the isolated Kaifeng Jews, to learn about their community and way of life, and to retrieve Holy Books from their ancient synagogue. It was on their second visit to Kaifeng in spring 1851 that the two Chinese missionaries obtained 40 small biblical manuscripts and purchased six Torah scrolls (out of twelve Torah scrolls seen on their previous trip) paying the Jewish community 400 taels of silver, the equivalent of about $160.
On December 11th, 1852, the London Society for the Promotion of Christianity among the Jews presented one of the six retrieved Torah scrolls to the British Museum. The scroll, which has been part of the British Library’s Hebrew collection since 1973, is composed of 95 strips of thick sheepskin sewn together with silk thread, rather than with the customary animal sinew. Its 239 columns of unpunctuated Hebrew text are written in black ink in a script that is similar to the square Hebrew script used by the Jews of Persia.
According to scholars, the Torah scrolls originating in Kaifeng were most probably created between 1643 and 1663.
Read more on British Library: https://blogs.bl.uk/asian-and-african/2020/05/kaifeng-torah-scroll.html