How to Book China Train Tickets with a Foreign Passport: 12306 vs Trip.com

Booking a Chinese train ticket with a foreign passport comes down to one choice and five steps. The choice is where you buy: the official 12306 app, which is cheaper but needs your passport verified first, or an agency such as Trip.com, which costs a little more and needs no verification. The five steps are the same either way — register, get verified (12306 only), book, pay, then show your passport at the station. Here's the choice in one table, and the rest of this guide walks through each step so you don't have to do any of it twice.

Whichever you pick, the ticket that comes out is the same: an electronic railway ticket tied to your passport, boarded with the passport itself. If you haven't yet decided whether to take the train at all, start with our complete guide to China's high-speed trains; this page assumes you have.

Steps 1–2: Register on 12306 and get your passport verified

Skip this section if you're going to book through an agency. For 12306, budget twenty minutes and do it at least a week before your first train, because the verification step is not instant and you don't want to be sorting it out from a hotel lobby.

1. Get the app or use the site. Search for "12306" in your app store — the official one is published by China Railway and is free — or use the English site at 12306.cn. Switch the app to English in its settings if it opens in Chinese.
2. Create an account. You'll need a phone number that can receive an SMS code. A foreign number works for many travelers, but if the code never arrives, a Chinese SIM card with a local number fixes it — a data-only travel eSIM won't receive the SMS. A local SIM is worth having anyway for maps and payments (see our SIM and eSIM guide).
3. Add yourself as a passenger with the passport. Choose passport as the document type — a foreign passport is one of the eight document types 12306 accepts for online booking, and on the English site it is the only one. Type the name exactly as the English name is printed on the passport: keep any spaces inside your names, and put a space between the surname and the given names. Don't add titles, don't drop middle names, and don't reorder the names if the passport shows the surname first. Add each travel companion the same way — every passport needs its own verification before it can go on an order.
4. Verify. The app asks for photos of the passport. After you submit, your passenger record sits in one of three states — verified (已通过), pending (待核验) or failed (未通过) — and only "verified" can buy tickets online. Look at the passenger list a day later. If it's still pending, or it has failed, there's a second route: take the passport to a railway station ticket window and ask them to verify it there. That works even if you're already in China and the app route has gone nowhere.

Step 3: When to book — presale, release times and the waitlist

Tickets go on sale 15 days before travel, counting the travel day as day one, so a ticket for the 20th appears on the 6th. That's the whole window: you can't book a month out, and for most trains you don't need to. Each departure station releases its tickets at its own time of day rather than at one national moment; 12306 publishes the release time for every station on a lookup page, which is worth a glance if you're chasing a popular train. The app sells and changes tickets from 05:00 to 01:00 the next morning, and on Tuesdays it closes at midnight instead, so an overnight booking attempt just won't go through.

For normal weeks, booking a few days ahead is fine and you'll have a choice of trains. The exceptions are the national holidays — Chinese New Year, the early-May break and the October Golden Week — plus Friday evenings and Sunday evenings on busy routes, when the popular trains sell out within minutes of release. For those, be on the app at the release time on the first day of sale, and if you miss it, use the waitlist rather than refreshing all week. Planning around the crowds is covered in our Golden Week survival guide.

The waitlist (候补, hòubǔ) is 12306's own standby system. When a train shows the waitlist option (候补) instead of a seat count, you add it to a waitlist order, pay the fare up front as a deposit, and the system keeps trying around the clock as other people cancel; it keeps trying until, at the latest, 20 minutes before departure, and any deposit that didn't turn into a ticket comes back in full. One order can cover up to three travel dates and up to 60 trains, and each user can keep up to six orders open at once. Because so many Chinese travelers book early and change later, waitlists on ordinary days come through surprisingly often. The official waitlist lives only in 12306; agencies run their own retry services on their own terms. It's one of the strongest reasons to get 12306 working.

Step 4: Choosing a seat, paying, and the one-ticket rule

Search by city and date, and the results list every train with the fare and the remaining seats for each class. Tap a train, pick the class, pick your passenger from the list, and — on most high-speed trains — choose a seat from a small map that shows which seats are window and which are aisle on that train. If you want to sit together, book everyone in one order. The classes themselves are explained in our seat class guide.

Then pay. 12306's checkout offers Chinese payment methods; whether it accepts your particular foreign card is something to check on the payment page itself rather than assume, and the reliable route for most visitors is an Alipay account with a foreign card linked — set up in our Alipay guide. You have a short window to pay before the seat is released, so have the payment method ready before you search. Two limits to know: one passport can hold one ticket per train per day, and a single order takes up to nine passengers. The first one matters if you try to "hold" two seats on the same train — the system won't let you.

Step 5: Travel day — your passport is the ticket

There is nothing to collect. Chinese railway tickets are electronic records tied to the passenger's document, and the document you booked with is what gets you on the train. Two pieces of paper confuse people, so to be clear: the "itinerary information sheet" you can print from a machine, and the reimbursement receipt you can request for expenses, are not tickets and won't get you through a gate. Screenshot your booking (train number, coach, seat, departure time) so you can read it in a hurry, and keep the passport in a pocket.

At the station, Chinese passengers scan an ID card at automatic gates. A foreign passport can't be read by those gates, so at every checkpoint — the station entrance, the boarding gate, and the exit at your destination — you use the manual channel (人工通道, réngōng tōngdào): a staffed lane where an officer looks at the passport and finds your ticket. It's normally at one end of the row of gates and marked in English at big stations. Build in ten extra minutes for it on busy days. The full station walkthrough is in navigating Chinese train stations.

If you need paper for an expense claim, ask for the reimbursement receipt: it's printed at a station ticket window or machine using the passport, within 180 days of the travel date. Station windows and machines print a paper ticket free of charge, while railway agency shops in town charge ¥5 per ticket. It's a receipt, not a boarding document.

After booking: refunds and changes

If you miss a train or plans move, two rules matter. First, refunds and changes are done in the app until 25 minutes before departure; in the last 25 minutes only a station ticket window can help. Second, the fee depends purely on how far ahead you act:

A change (改签, gǎiqiān) moves you to another train without refunding and rebooking, but each ticket can be changed only once, and a ticket that was changed after its original departure time can't be refunded afterwards. So if your new plan is still uncertain, refund and rebook rather than using up the single change. Changing to a different destination station is also possible online, but only until 48 hours before departure. Agency bookings follow the same railway fee tiers, with the agency's own handling on top — check its policy before you book a ticket you might not use.

The timeline

• Before you leave home: install 12306, register, add your passport, submit verification. Or decide you'll use an agency.
• 15 days before the train: tickets appear at the departure station's release time; book, or waitlist if sold out.
• Up to 25 minutes before departure: refund or change in the app if plans move (changes during the app's selling hours).
• Travel day: passport in hand, manual channel at the entrance and the gate, coach number from your booking screenshot.

Last updated: August 2026