By Post-Intelligencer Staff

"The what?" asked the Chinese official.

"Seattle Post-Intelligencer."

"Intelligencer? Do you work for the government?" He was polite but guarded.

"No. It's a newspaper."

"Seattle. Where is that?"

"It's in Washington."

A few minutes later, the official, a government interpreter in Beijing, introduced the reporter to the deputy minister of a high government agency.

"'He is a reporter," he explained, "from the Washington Post."

"Intelligencer?"

"What kind of a name is that?"

"Are you with the CIA?"

No one knows what was in Sam Maxwell's mind when he changed the name of the defunct Seattle Gazette to The Weekly Intelligencer in 1867.

According to one source, he was looking more for length than meaning. He wanted something impressive for his new publication but was hampered by his limited stock of letters in 72-point type to use for the nameplate. He decided on a long name that would fill up sufficient space on the top of Page 1 to make it sound important.

Just what is an intelligencer? Modern dictionaries provide little clue to the rich history of the word, equating an intelligencer with being a news-gatherer or spy.

But Maxwell, a Dubliner by birth, was intimately familiar with the famous Intelligencers of England. Although today it is more common to hear of U.S. newspapers named Gazette, Post, Times or Chronicle, one of the earliest general-circulation newspapers in England was the Mercurius Britannicus, published in 1641. Its Monday edition carried the alternative title, The English Intelligencer, according to the Oxford Dictionary of the English Language.

"I desire her to show it to the author of the Intelligencer and to publish it if he thinks fit."
-- Jonathan Swift, 1728

Another early paper was the Kingdoms Intelligencer, published for two years beginning in 1661 by the English Parliament in opposition to the king, Simpson said. There were other publications called the German Intelligencer, the Swedish Intelligencer and the Orange Intelligencer.

The name "Intelligencer" was used heavily in Pennsylvania and other Eastern states in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, Simpson said.

The most famous Intelligencer in the United States was the National Intelligencer, founded by Samuel Harrison Smith in 1800. The paper survived 65 years, a long life for papers in those days.

"Its long life was partly due to the high journalistic standards, the quiet dignity and the strong intellectual character of the newspaper," wrote William E. Ames, another UW journalism professor, in his history of that periodical.

One would like to think it was those characteristics that prompted Maxwell to adopt the name Intelligencer for his long-enduring publication.

The Seattle P-I isn't the last to carry on the tradition of Intelligencers.

Other Intelligencers live on. One in Edwardsville, Ill., is owned by the Hearst Corp., which also owns the P-I, and another is located in Wheeling, W. Va. There also is an Intelligencer in Belleville, Ontario, Canada. An Intelligencer-Journal is published in Lancaster, Penn., and an Intelligencer-Record in Doylestown, Penn.

And would you believe another Post-Intelligencer?

The P-I of Paris, Tenn., has been in continuous publication since 1866.

"Our paper started as The Weekly Intelligencer in 1866," Bill Williams, a Paris P-I president, editor and publisher, once said. "About a year or two later, someone started the Paris Post and the two papers merged within a couple of years. Of course, Intelligencer in those days carried the meaning of town crier."

The Paris P-I is an afternoon daily with a circulation of 8,500 in a town of 10,000.

So we have not only two P-I's, but in 1867 two Weekly Intelligencers. Could it just be possible that Maxwell got the idea for his Weekly Intelligencer from the one in Paris, Tenn.? All we know is that Maxwell came to Seattle by way of San Francisco. Whether he came to San Francisco from Dublin by way of Tennessee has been lost in the sands of time.