Pekin boasts of a printed sheet on silk which appeared every week for over a thousand years, but in the modern sense, it cannot claim to be a newspaper. The London Gazette, published in 1665, twice weekly, remained a continuous series since that date, but again, it was not a newspaper in the modern sense, for it carried no news apart from that of the Court and Government. The first 23 issues were called the Oxford Gazette, for the Court had fled from London to escape the plague:
