<P> Contrary to a sometimes voiced belief, the Peking Gazette was not a newspaper, but a government bulletin, although it might be considered a distant precursor: </P> <P> The East Asian press was studied relatively late in the West . One of the reasons is that newspapers did not exist in China, Japan, and Korea until these countries opened to Western influences . There were certainly forerunners of newsprint also in the indigenous tradition, like the famous Peking Gazette (Jingpao) which is often claimed to be oldest newspaper of the world . We find numerous little articles in Western papers on the Jingbao, usually from secondary or tertiary sources; they do not take into account that this gazette had limited circulation and that it just contained edicts and decrees--thus it does not fit the modern definition of newspaper . But it definitely was a forerunner of newsprint . </P>

The peking news was the first newspaper of the world