Car License Plates, China

During a recent 10 day, 2500km hitch hiking trip through Yunnan Province and up to Chengdu, Sichuan Province, I studied the license plates of Chinese cars. Whether youre looking to hitch hike or are just particularly interested in license plates, here’s what I found out.

License (or registration) plates in China are pretty simple once you know what you’re looking at. Like with the EU or US, there is a system to tell you where exactly the car is from, making it either easier to flag down the cars heading in the right direction for you, or just adding a bit of car-spotting-fun to your journey.

My main example is for Yunnan Province, as that is where we hitch hiked most extensively, but the same principle applies across the board – with exceptions for cities that have become their own municipality such as Beijing, Shanghai or Chongqing;

A typical Chinese license plate will be made up of a symbol, a letter, then a series of numbers such as 云A 12345.

Lets break it down a little;

云 = the symbol to explain the car’s Province, this one is from Yunnan Province

A = ‘A’ always means the car is from the capital of that province, in this case, Kunming, Yunnan Province.

12345 = random series of numbers… this part is of little to no importance.

Another example is;

川A 12345

川 = Sichuan Province

A = stands for Chengdu, the Capital city of Sichuan Province.

Simple, right?

As you leave the bigger cities behind, the letters after the provincial symbol move further through the alphabet, which is simple enough, but finding out which letter is for the city you are heading to is rather difficult unless you can fully explain yourself in Chinese to a local person who owns a car. For example in Yunnan Province;

云A 12345 is for Kunming

云L 12345 is for Dali (330km outside Kunming)

云P 12345 is for Lijiang INSERT LINK (500km outside Kunming)

云R 12345 is for Shangri-La INSERT LINK (600km outside Kunming)

Though the only reason I figured out anything other than Kunming’s ‘A’ license plate was down to trying to get to each city/town and once there noticing the majority of the plates had these particular letters after the provincial symbol’s, making the way back a fun game of Spot The City.

If you have any other questions or information, please let me know! Further, if you want to find out some information about any of the places mentioned in this post, or about hitch hiking in China, follow the links in-text or below;

Shangri-La,

Lijiang

Dali

Hitch Hiking in China