Poverty drove Kaifeng locals to sell fake Hebrew scrolls to Western collectors

Evidence

Yet the interest in the Kaifeng Hebrew scrolls continued. For the locals in Kaifeng, a place of overwhelming poverty, selling fakes to Westerners had become a reasonably profitable business, even legitimate in comparison to selling opium and other drugs. — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 358

Categorization

• CANDY: A neat dark fact: a poor Chinese community made a legitimate living counterfeiting holy artifacts for credulous Western buyers.
• corroborated: 3 independent passages support this claim — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 358