Using Kangsan Travel to get your Chinese Tourist Visa processed in Korea

This is a Chinese (L) tourist visa that was processed in Seoul.

    Thinking about taking a trip to China? If you have six months left on your Alien Registration Card (ARC) and are currently living in Korea you may apply for a Chinese tourist visa. Attention: If you don't have six months left you will have to jump through some hoops. See http://www.goneseoulsearching.com/2010/08/chinas-new-visa-policy-3-lousy-options.html to read more about trying to get around this problem.
    So for those of you that meet the requirements, you can get your Chinese visa processed and placed in your passport in only a week. You must go through a travel agency that offers this service. I recommend using http://www.kangsantravel.com/. You can visit Kangsan travel in Seoul, Daegu, or Busan in their office. Or you can mail your passport and required documents to them and they will process the visa.
   If you are American you will pay a  whopping 200,000 won or around $200 visa free. This is courtesy of the Chinese government, not Kangsan Travel. If you are Canadian you luck out and only have to pay 60,000 won for the visa. Kangsan will only charge Americans a 10,000 won handling fee to process the visa, and a 30,000 won fee for Canadians. How they figure this fee who knows, but at least the Koreans are cheaper than the Chinese.

    Yes, its a little strange giving your passport over to a random travel agency. But this is the only way to get your Chinese visa processed. The Chinese government will not let foreigners in Korea get their visa processed directly at the embassy. I highly recommend Kangsan because they did a great job with my visa. I showed up to their office in Seoul and handed them my passport and money and there were no problems. One week later they returned my passport to me in a nice purple case with the Chinese tourist visa inside.
    Keep in mind a standard Chinese visa only allows one entry. This means you cannot leave the country and come back for the 30 day time frame.
  
If you have any questions or comments about "Surviving the Christmas season in Korea without family"  please leave them in the comment box below or email them to seoulfoodgirl@gmail.com
  Gone Seoul Searching by Marie Webb is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at goneseoulsearching@gmail.com.