Kaiyuan Za Bao, possibly the world’s first magazine, begins publication in China

Story: 713 C.E.  |  Last updated: January 1, 0713

In the early eighth century, as the Tang dynasty reached the peak of its power, Chinese imperial officials began receiving something entirely new: a regularly produced, hand-transcribed publication delivering the news of the court directly to the provinces. The Kaiyuan Za Bao — sometimes called the Kaiyuan Chao Bao, or Bulletin of the Court — may have been the world’s first magazine. It almost certainly helped define what human communication could look like at scale.

Key facts

• Kaiyuan Za Bao: The publication first appeared in 713 C.E., during the Kaiyuan era of Emperor Xuanzong’s reign, and continued until approximately 734 C.E. — covering over two decades of Tang dynastic life.
• Tang dynasty press: Editors collected political and domestic news daily, then scribes hand-transcribed the content onto silk to be distributed outward from the capital, Chang’an, to provincial officials across the empire.
• Early periodical publishing: Scholars have described the publication alternately as China’s first newspaper, an official gazette, and the world’s first magazine — reflecting just how unprecedented this format was and how hard it is to fit it into modern categories.

A publication unlike anything before it

The Tang dynasty was one of the most cosmopolitan periods in Chinese history. Chang’an, the imperial capital, was among the largest and most connected cities in the world, linked by the Silk Road trade networks to Central Asia, Persia, India, and beyond. Ideas, technologies, and goods moved through it constantly.

Against that backdrop, the Kaiyuan Za Bao emerged as a tool of imperial governance. Its primary audience was not the general public but the officials who ran the empire’s far-flung regions. Each edition gathered political news and domestic updates, then distributed it across the provinces. The medium was silk — precious, durable, and appropriate to the gravity of imperial communication.

What made this remarkable was not just the content but the regularity. This was not a one-time proclamation or an occasional decree. It was a recurring publication, assembled and dispatched on a structured schedule. That rhythm — that commitment to producing and distributing information repeatedly over time — is what marks it as something genuinely new in the history of human communication.

What “world’s first magazine” actually means

The claim that the Kaiyuan Za Bao was the world’s first magazine deserves careful handling. Some historians describe it as a newspaper; others call it an official gazette. The word “magazine” — from the Arabic makhāzin, meaning storehouse — carries connotations of curated content, recurring publication, and broad distribution that the Kaiyuan Za Bao arguably satisfies, even if not by intention.

What is not seriously disputed is that it predates the European tradition of periodical publishing by nearly a thousand years. The first European newspapers emerged in the early 17th century. The history of the European press is well documented — but that documentation has sometimes overshadowed earlier developments elsewhere in the world.

The Kaiyuan Za Bao is a reminder that the history of media, like the history of most technologies, does not begin where Western textbooks tend to start it.

Lasting impact

The Kaiyuan Za Bao helped establish a model for official information management that would influence Chinese governance for centuries. The practice of issuing court gazettes — known collectively as dibao — continued in China for over a thousand years, persisting into the late imperial period and becoming one of the longest-running traditions of official print communication in human history.

More broadly, the publication points to a fundamental insight: that regular, structured information-sharing makes governance and coordination possible at scale. The same logic underlies modern journalism, institutional newsletters, policy briefings, and — yes — magazines. The Kaiyuan Za Bao did not invent that logic, but it gave it a durable form at a remarkably early moment.

The Tang dynasty’s openness to new ideas, shaped partly by its connections to the wider Eurasian world, created the conditions for this kind of innovation. The Kaiyuan Za Bao was not an accident. It was a product of a sophisticated, confident, outward-looking civilization.

Blindspots and limits

The source record for the Kaiyuan Za Bao is thin. We know it existed and something about its format and audience, but few original copies have survived, and scholarly debate continues about its precise nature, scope, and influence. The label “world’s first magazine” is a retrospective designation, not one its creators would have used or recognized. It is also worth noting that the publication served imperial officials, not the broader population — it was a tool of elite governance, not public information in any modern sense.

Read more

For more on this story, see: Wikipedia — Kaiyuan Za Bao

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