Finding That Pesky Passport Book Number on My Chinese Passport
So, the other day I was wrestling with some online form, I think it was for a visa application or maybe some travel registration, can’t quite recall exactly which one. Anyway, it asked for my ‘passport book number’. Now, I grabbed my little red Chinese passport, flipped it open to the main page, you know, the one with my picture and all the main details.
I saw the big passport number right there at the top right, usually starts with an ‘E’ or ‘G’ these days. I thought, “Okay, that must be it, right?” Easy enough. But then I looked back at the form, and it specifically said ‘passport book number‘. That little word ‘book’ made me pause. Was it the same thing? Sometimes these forms have tricky wording.
I started flipping through the actual visa pages inside the passport booklet. Just casually looking at first. Then I noticed something. On the bottom edge of nearly every visa page, there was this series of numbers, kind of small, and they looked like they were punched through the paper – you know, perforated.
I held it up to the light. Yep, definitely little holes making up the numbers. I checked a few different pages, and the number sequence was the same on all of them. It was different from the main passport number on the photo page.
That’s when it clicked. This perforated number running along the bottom of the visa pages, that had to be the ‘passport book number’ they were asking for. It makes sense, right? It’s physically part of the ‘book’ itself, punched into every page.
- Looked at the main photo page – saw the main passport number (like E).
- Felt unsure because the form specified ‘book number’.
- Started physically flipping through the visa pages inside.
- Spotted the small, perforated numbers at the bottom edge of those pages.
- Confirmed it was the same number repeated on multiple pages.
- Realized this was the ‘passport book number’.
It’s not super obvious if you don’t know where to look, quite different from the main passport number which is printed clearly on the information page. It’s usually a sequence of digits, sometimes with a letter. Why they don’t just call it the ‘perforated page number’ or something clearer, I don’t know. But yeah, if you ever get asked for the ‘passport book number’ on a Chinese passport, check the bottom edge of your visa pages for those little punched-through numbers. Took me a bit of head-scratching and page-flipping, but I got there eventually.