China Customs

About a week after arriving here in Beijing, we got a call from Deb’s coworker Susy that our extra luggage had arrived. We had given her number to the baggage people since we didn’t have Chinese cell phone numbers yet when sending our bags.

This delay was actually by design. Asian airlines seem to have much stricter weight limits than US lines, and our extra 47 Kg of luggage beyond the allowance would have cost about $2000 to take on the plane(!!!), so we shipped it as “unaccompanied” baggage for much cheaper.

So, off we tore to go pick up our two bags and a box from the unaccompanied baggage service office at the airport before they closed at 4:30 pm. It took our taxi about 45 minutes to get there through the traffic, so it was 3:30 when we arrived. We were excited to be so early, and to have so much time to pick up our bags.

The building was pretty giant, and had 4 entrances spaced out evenly along the front wall labeled A-D. We went into Hall B as instructed over the phone, and were excited that there was almost no line. When we got to the counter, we showed our passports and after some photocopying and a bit of looking around, the lady behind the desk brought out documents showing our names and number and weight of our bags. Progress!

But at this point it was explained to us through gestures, broken English, and broken Mandarin that we needed to go to Hall C to get a stamp from China Customs.

Our scavenger hunt had begun.

We headed down to the next chunk of the building to Hall C, which was rather desolate inside. There were two rooms in the front of this building. One side had a counter with cubicles behind it, and a rather gruff man who did not look happy that we had arrived, and the other held a desk with a friendly man who insisted that we were in the wrong place, and instead had to go out of this gated building’s grounds, over to the next complex that was actually labelled “China Customs.” So we headed over there, while getting a bit more concerned about the time.

In we went through the front door of the China Customs building. We talked to someone at the front counter who looked at our papers for a minute or so and then gestured that we had to go out and around the building, where we found a smaller side door. In there, a nice woman seemed to recognize our papers. She asked for the photocopies of our passports, which the woman in Hall B had made. And kept. So after talking to many people and making some phone calls, the woman was able to have new photocopies made of our passports, which she now kept. She stamped our papers, and sent us back to Hall B.

Hall B looked our papers over and sent us to get our bags from “Beside Hall A”, which is the site of the Cargo area. We walked over there and proudly showed them our stamped papers. They took them and looked around for our bags. Soon we were told that our bags had been found, and that we just had to have them inspected before we could take them. And to get them inspected, we would have to go back to Hall C and get someone there to come with us back here to inspect the bags. I asked a few times if they could use the phone to call Hall C to request someone, but that for some reason was completely out of the question.

Back to Hall C, where the gruff man behind the counter who spoke no English was nonetheless making it clear that he was not going to come with us. So we called Susy who had generously offered to help us translate. After she spoke with him, he gave us some new papers, stamped them, and sent us back out.

Figuring that we had somehow passed a lazy “inspection”, we took our newly stamped papers back to “Beside Hall A” and asked for our bags, but we were told that we still needed to be inspected. Since it was now just past 4:30, we went back to Hall B, where we’d started to try to get rushed through, but they were showing no signs of shutting down. They explained that we had to take these new papers back to China Customs to show them that we had gotten these new stamped pages.

After hiking back to China Customs, we were told that we had to fill out more info on the new forms, which had to be translated for us line by line. Once we had these new forms filled out, the nice lady took our new forms and our original form, added a new stamp to our original form and kept the rest of the pages. Further progress!

Back to “Beside Hall A” and showed them that we now had both necessary stamps. But now they wanted us to have three stamps, although they no longer wanted us to drag anyone down there, which seemed like an improvement.

Back to Hall B to ask them what more we needed. While Deb started to call Susy for more translation, another customer in the office started gesturing us to follow him. So Deb asked Susy to talk to him to help us figure out what was going on. She said that he was trying to help us get the 3rd stamp that we needed, but he was gesturing for us to get into his Van, which seemed a little too sketchy for us at the moment. So we thanked him but headed back into Hall B. Back inside, we waited in the line and talked to a new lady behind the counter, who started to try to explain where we needed to go, and then changed gears and told us to go with another man who needed the same stamp. How fortuitous!

So we went with this second man with a van, who drove us all the way back out of the airport complex, down some little side streets, onto a muddy dirt driveway, to small corrugated iron building with the temporary look of a construction site office.

We followed the man inside and found more customs workers in uniform behind a similar counter. We had finally found the inspection office. After the nice man got his stamp, we walked up to the counter and a customs agent spoke at us in Mandarin. Deb responded in Mandarin that we didn’t understand. He then said “Food?”, we said “No,” and his immediate response of a swift stamp completed our unholy stamp trifecta. Note that this was the entirety of the inspection of our bags, which by the way were still back at “Beside Hall A.”

The nice man drove us back to Hall B, where we were charged 15 RMB (~$2), and then
directed to the cashier where we then were asked to pay a separate 20 RMB. This ended up being all we had to pay in Customs fees! We were expecting much worse, so that was a nice surprise. As was the fact that Hall B was still open at 5:45 when they had claimed they would close at 4:30!

We now took our completed triforce of stamps and payment receipts with us to “Beside Hall A,” and very quickly were given our bags!

Angels then descended from the heavens and congratulated us on completing our quest. We thanked the angels, caught a cab, and headed home.