China Visa Application – Everything you need to know

Update – On January 29 2026, UK prime minister Keir Starmer announced UK citizens no longer need a visa for up to 30 days travel in China, although it’s not yet clear when that applies from.

Lucy & Sam here, we’re from the UK and heading off on trip to China in April. The tourist China visa is the most convoluted visa application form we’ve done (out of the 32 countries we’ve been to). The process also changed in 2025, so here’s an up-to-date guide on how it went and what to expect.

To get a China visa for tourism (type L), you have to submit a chunky application form with a photo that fits the exact criteria and then (once that’s approved) go to your local visa centre to hand over your passport. You can then pick it up, with visa attached, a few days later.

The process used to be more complicated, before the electronic application forms were enhanced in 2025. We got our tourist visas (type L) in January 2026 – here’s how it went (and our tips).

The China visa application form

First off you need to decide which China visa centre you’re submitting your passport to and use their website.

We went for London, here’s the website if you’re doing the same – China visa centre London.

The process is: set up an account, fill in the application form, upload documents and submit for review.

The form is very detailed. It requires passport style photos with white backgrounds, information about you, your passport (which needs to have 6+ months validity), your job, parents and contact details for all of those.

Then you need the information about your stay in China. That includes flights in and out, as well as hotel stays for the duration.

As well as filling in the form, you’ll need to upload a passport-style photo, a picture of the photo page in your passport, a picture of two empty pages in the passport and the booking confirmations for your flights in and out of China and hotels.

Tip: On the application form, you request what kind of tourist visa you want. It’s the same price (£130) for a single or multi-entry visa so we requested a two year, double entry visa even though we only have one trip planned.

We found the form straightforward apart from two points :-

1. The photo – when they say white background they mean white background. I tried a few different photos (phone selfies) on what most people would call a white background and they were all rejected. We ended up using paint to turn the background white and that was accepted.
2. The hotel confirmation – we’d booked it in my name so Sam’s application was initially rejected. They advised us to upload a signed letter from me saying he’d be staying with me and that did the trick.

Online it says the process can take 3-5 days but for both of us it took less than one working day so we were pretty impressed.

Once the forms were confirmed (after my first attempt and Sam’s second), we were emailed a PDF of the Visa Application Certificate, which you need to print ready to go to the visa centre within three weeks.

At the application centre

Before the online application form was enhanced in 2025 you needed to take a lot more documents to the visa centre. Now it’s just the application certificate pdf (printed), your passport and a payment method.

The London centre is only open Monday to Friday which is a pain if you work those days. So we decided to take a Monday off work in January for a fun morning out to the visa centre.

Google AI recommended we arrive before 9am (around quarter to) to beat the queues. So we set off with this in mind but obviously all the trains were very delayed so we didn’t end up arriving until 9.25am.

In hindsight, I’d suggest it’s better to arrive after 9am so you can sit and wait in the warm waiting room rather than queueing outside in the cold before the doors open around 9am.

By the time we arrived there was no queue outside and we walked straight in to the front desk.

The guy manning the desk was great. He was very loud, happy and making us laugh while we were waiting. On arrival, we had to show him our printed application certificate and passports before he gave us a queue ticket with a number on.

We were number 67 and the screens all around the room indicated they were already on number 35.

We took our seats in a the large waiting room with loads of seats and Sam got his book out while I started writing this post.

We saw a few people arrive without the certificate printed and they were sent to a printing shop nearby to get the docs sorted.

After 35 minutes our number was called and we were sent to counter number 10.

All we had to do was handover our queue ticket, application certificates and passport.

After a few minutes, he told us we’d get two year multi entry visas with a maximum stay of 90 days and gave us passport pickup forms and another queue card to head downstairs and pay.

(You can get your passport posted back to you but it can take longer so we opted to pick them up 3 days later).

The queue downstairs was nothing like the one upstairs. We waited a couple of minutes and were called to the counter to pay.

We handed over the pickup forms and queue tickets, paid the £130 each, she stamped our pickup forms and gave them back to us and we were all done. One of us will be back on Thursday to collect our passports and China visas.

All-in-all, it took about 45 minutes from the moment we arrived, so we decided to enjoy the rest of our day off and get some brunch, guarding the passport pickup forms with our lives (we’ve heard it’s a nightmare to get your passport back if you lose it).

Given how long and detailed the application form is, we didn’t really know what to expect when we got to the visa centre. But it was very easy and all the staff were really nice (shoutout again to the man front of house, he was great).

If you don’t believe me, here’s Sam’s verdict :-

“Not stressful at all, quite a good vibe – it also feels like you’re in Asia in that waiting room.” – Sam