It wasn’t too hard to register an account on China Railway 12306, but verifying the account was no smooth process—at least it wasn’t a smooth process for us at the time of writing this which is in February 2025. However, through trialling things here and there, we managed to verify our China Railway 12306 account and have it ready for purchasing tickets for ourselves and passengers.
Purchasing tickets through the China Railway 12306 app was yet another issue which we didn’t expect to arise. We’ll talk about this after explaining the things we did which allowed us to create an account and verify our email address and identity.
Some things we’d like to note: We registered our China Railway 12306 accounts outside of China in our home country. In order for us to pass through the issues from the stage of registering to verification, we used three platforms: The website version of China Railway 12306 (www.12306.cn), the Android app on a mobile phone, and the iOS app on an iPad. This was because, as new users of China Railway 12306, we weren’t sure why we were encountering issues, so we used each platform to troubleshoot the issues and get to the stage of verifying our China Railway 12306 accounts.
We divide the blog into the below sections:
- Registering an account
- Verifying email address
- Verifying identity
- Verifying passengers
- Extra information and thoughts
Registering an account
You can register a China Railway 12306 account through either the website www.12306.cn or download the mobile app to register. We registered our accounts through using the English version of www.12306.cn as well as on the iOS app. Our reason for creating an account through using the English version is because the registration form on the English version only requires you to provide an email address as contact information and a phone number was optional. The phone number was a mandatory field in the Chinese version and the only phone numbers it accepts are ones from China, Hong Kong, Macao, and Taiwan.
You can choose to create an account through the www.12306.cn website, the Android app, or the iOS app. All should allow you to create an account successfully. However, with the iOS app of China Railway 12306, our experience with it is that after creating an account, we struggled to log into our account because the place to log in (via ‘Me’ link then clicking the profile picture icon up on the top-left) brought us to a blank screen.
So, to create a China Railway 12306 account on the website it’s simply clicking on the ‘Register’ link at the navigation bar. You will then be directed to a screen where you fill in your ID document information. For foreigners, the only option is a foreign passport. You set your password and provide your email address as contact information.
If creating an account in the iOS/Android app, navigate to the registration page through clicking ‘Me’ > profile picture icon > ‘Register’ button. The app version gives you the option to scan your ID document to fill in the ID document fields or you can manually fill them in. If you choose to fill the fields in manually, just click the ‘Later on’ button on the screen and you will be directed to the registration form to manually fill in the fields.
China Railway 12306 provides some handy information on how to fill in the ‘Name’ field and the ‘Passport number’ field in cases where names contain characters like hyphens or brackets or passport numbers has anything other than numbers.
If using the website to register, you can find this information on how to fill in your name and passport number through the link “Check the rules for filling passport information” which is on the right of the ‘Name’ field.
If using the app version to register, there are two locations you can click to find the handy information about how to fill in the ‘Name’ and ‘Passport number’ fields: ‘See entry guidelines’ and ‘Guidelines’. ‘See entry guidelines’ has more information, so click this link. This link is just above the ‘Country/Region’ field.
Verifying email address
We had trouble receiving the email verification email from China Railway 12306 to verify our email address. Searching online, we read others think it might be due to some email addresses not being valid or doesn’t work such as Microsoft’s Hotmail and Outlook email addresses or certain email addresses were thought to be more successful in receiving a link and passing verification than others such as Google’s Gmail email address. We have this thought that these might not be the reasons for failure to verify email addresses. None of the emails we tried to verify were Gmail email addresses and one of the email addresses was a discontinued Microsoft email address like the Hotmail email address. Verification emails sends to Outlook email addresses. All our email addresses successfully verified.
We couldn’t quite work out the pattern of how to get that link to show up in our inbox (or spam box) in order to verify the email addresses we needed to verify. It was a bit of trial and error and patience which got us through to verifying all of the email addresses. As we haven’t worked out a pattern on how to get that email verification email sent to our emails, we can only provide you what we think helped us receive the verification email for the email addresses we needed to verify.
- On the China Railway 12306’s website www.12306.cn, switch to the English version and log in.
- If a dialogue box pops up asking you to verify your email, follow the directions and request a verification email to be sent to verify your email address. See if it comes through.
- If it comes through, click it and see if it verifies your account.
If the email verification email you received fails to verify your email address or if the email verification email hasn’t come through to either your inbox or your spam box, come back in 30 minutes. You may log out of the account and shut things down if you like. After 30 minutes, use the website again and try the below:
- Log into the English version of www.12306.cn. Switch to Chinese version. (Note: we say to log into the English version then switching to Chinese version because logging into the Chinese version directly will ask for a phone number.)
- We want to get to the Personal Center page. To do this, click your name which is located on the top-right corner of the navigation bar.
- A dialogue box should appear. It will ask you to verify your contact information. Click the ‘x’ button to dismiss it.
- We want to access the email verification link on the page instead of the dialogue box to verify your email address. Find and click the hyperlinked words, “请验证邮箱” in the sentence “如果您要接收12306的服务邮件, 请验证邮箱.” (Find, copy, and paste this line if you aren’t able to find this on the page).
- This should lead you to the page where your passport information is. We want to find the email verification hyperlink. Find 邮箱. Click the hyperlink 未通过核验. A dialogue box should appear and give you two buttons to choose. Click the button “发送邮件” to send an email verification email to your email address.
- See if you have received the email verification email. It could come through to your inbox or spam box.
If the email verification comes through, you may find that after clicking the verification link the email verification link opens up in the app version if you have it installed on the same device you’re accessing the China Railway 12306 website. When this happens, that email verification link sent to your email address will likely fail. So, just give it one more attempt. Send another email verification email to yourself from the Chinese version of the website.
If the email verification email still hasn’t come through, if you have access to the Android app version, you can try verifying your email through your Android app. Log into the English version and find the link that allows you to verify your email address. We have tried this and it can help successfully send that verification email and verify your email address after a failed attempt in the website.
With the iOS app, from our experience, it wasn’t possible to send a verification email to verify our email address since the screen we needed to reach to get that email verification link under ‘Me’ > profile picture icon > ‘My Account’ came up blank. However, if you find that you can access your account page, try navigating to a link to request an email verification email in the iOS app.
Otherwise, give a rest on trying to verify your email address and try again the next day. We have this feeling there might be a limit to how many times you can try verifying your email address. Three attempts in a session seems not too many attempts since we remember receiving three email verification emails in one session, but it came in a delayed fashion and it came into either the inbox or the spam box. Also, possibly don’t try verifying your email address too many times in one session. We found that it was not doing anything to send that verification email to us. So, better to give it a rest and try another day.
One thing we can say, though, we feel the website does well in sending you that verification email to verify your email address. So, try the website version on your next attempt and probably the Chinese version with the steps above. If it fails, try again another day. We believe the verification email will eventually send and successfully have you verify your email address.
If you successfully verify your email address in, say, the website version (it should say ‘activated’), but in the iOS app and/or Android app it still says you need to verify your email address, just give the system some time to permeate the ‘activated’ status through to these places. It will eventually permeate the update to all. There’s no need to request a verification email again to verify your email address in the other platforms once you have gotten the ‘activated’ status in one of the platforms.
Verifying identity
Our experience with verifying our account through both the Chinese version and the English version of the China Railway 12306 website was unsuccessful no matter how many attempts we made to verify identity. It provided a page to upload photos of our passport and us holding our passport to verify our account; however, we couldn’t upload the photos successfully and we kept receiving the error message ‘System is busy. Please try later’. We thought maybe changing the filenames of the photos to Chinese characters and only used a filename with a maximum of four Chinese characters would help. We thought it was helping when a couple of times it gave a dialogue box with a green tick and a ‘Commit success!’ message. However, the account continued to have the status ‘Fail verification Online verification’ under the Verification status field.
We were also unsuccessful through the Android app. The Android app did give us the option to do face verification or SMS verification. However, when we selected the face verification option, it only led us to a message informing us it could not be done at this time.
And we couldn’t verify our identity through the iOS app when we couldn’t get to the Accounts screen because the screen rendered blank. Trying the ‘ID verification’ menu item in the Settings screen also went nowhere and it did nothing when we clicked it in both the Chinese version and the English version.
Saying this, though, we did manage to get to the identity verification screen through the iOS app. We stumbled upon it when we were playing around and seeing how we booked train tickets on the app. Clicking the ‘book’ button on a train ticket, a dialogue box appeared and it asked us to verify our identity. This initiated the identity verification process.
So, explaining our steps in how we initiated the identity verification process in the iOS app: Have the China Railway 12306 iOS app in the English version. We were logged out at the time. So, not logged in, choose a ticket to book. You can randomly book a ticket or you can choose one you might book for real. It doesn’t really matter since after you click that ‘book’ button, it will stop you from proceeding any further in the booking process when the system notifies you through a dialogue box that you need to verify your identity first before you can purchase your train ticket.
Click the ‘book’ button. After clicking the ‘book’ button, you should be asked to log in. After logging in, you should be brought to the identity verification screen where you see your passport details. Your passport details should be greyed out and uneditable. You will also see two containers. There’s one for you to upload a photo of your passport and one for you to upload a photo of you holding your passport. After uploading these photos and confirming the upload, you should see a screen which informs you your account is under review.
When you see the message informing your account is under review, it’s a very good sign of having successfully uploaded your identity verification photos. We believe the next screen should be a big green tick if verification is successful, but for us, it hung on the ‘under review’ screen for a bit, so we just swiped the app away to close it down and went into the app again. Upon returning back into the app a few seconds later, we found the status of our account had been updated to being verified.
Once you have verified your account on one platform, you should also find that your account will be verified on the other platforms as well. If not, just give it a bit of time for the changes to permeate through to each of the platforms. Eventually, each of the platforms will show your account as being verified if one platform shows your account has been successfully verified. Ours did permeate through to the website and the Android app as soon as it was verified in the iOS app.
We only tried this method on the iOS app, so we only know for sure this works on the iOS app. However, it could work on the Android app. So, in the Android app, do the same steps mentioned above to see if it will help you verify your identity and verify your account. Trying this method using the website might possibly also work to verify your account, but we didn’t attempt it because we couldn’t search train tickets in the English version. Only the Chinese version allowed us to search for train tickets and with the website booking layout looking rather daunting, we weren’t keen to test it on this platform. So, we just tried what worked when we signed up another account.
Note: If you find that the above method fails to upload your verification photos, see if changing the filenames of your identity verification photos with four Chinese characters can help with uploading successfully. We’re not sure if this is important, but it’s how we successfully uploaded the photos.
Verifying passengers
China Railway 12306 allows you to purchase tickets for yourself and your passengers. However, in order to purchase tickets for your passengers, you must verify your passengers after adding them to your list of passengers in your account.
Adding passengers through the mobile app is more user friendly, so that’s where we added passengers. Our experience in adding passengers in the English version was only possible via the Android app. It wasn’t possible to add passengers in the English version of the iOS app because we could only partially view the form and couldn’t scroll down to all the fields we needed to fill in.
One note about adding passengers via the English version of the app: When we used the app to add passengers for one of the China Railway 12306 accounts, we found that it didn’t provide a field to specify the passenger type. The result came to be having all passengers set up with the passenger type ‘Child’. We only realised our passengers were set up with the incorrect passenger type when we switched to the Chinese version. The website was better in this area. On our first China Railway 12306 account, we used the website version in English to add passengers. All our passengers were correctly set up because the website version had the passenger type field. If your passengers’ passenger type are incorrectly set up, switch to the Chinese version on the app to update this information. Or you could update it on the website version of China Railway 12306 in the English version.
Thinking back, there was actually a clue which told us the passenger type was incorrectly set up with ‘Child’ for all our passengers during the process where we added passengers. The clue was a dialogue box giving information about the type of tickets one can buy if the passenger is a child. It came after entering all the passenger’s information. So, if you find this dialogue box then you will need to update the passenger type of your passengers if your passengers are not supposed to be ‘Child’.
Verifying passengers was also not easy. It’s buggy in this area too. On the first account, we had to verify all passengers. On a second account, we found that some passengers verified without needing to upload ID document photos to verify them while other passengers required going through the verification process. We can’t be too sure why this is, but we believe it could be that if the passenger has already been verified on an account, they will come through verified on another account. (We can only guess.)
Verifying passengers on the English version should be just clicking the passenger who failed verification then checking that the details we’ve entered for that passenger is correct. After that, the system should give you one last opportunity to double check everything before it brings you to a page where you upload a photo of your passenger’s ID document. If successful, it should say verification is under review before taking you to a screen with a big green tick.
In the English version of both the Android app and iOS app, we couldn’t get to the passenger verification screen through clicking on the row of the passengers that failed verification. Choosing the edit icon (the pencil icon) next to the passenger got us to the verification screen. However, it didn’t help with successfully verifying passengers since it kept going round in a loop of bringing us to the screen to check passenger information and to the screen where we upload a photo of the passenger’s ID document. There was also no way for us to stop this loop except swiping the app away to close it down.
The only way we could verify the passengers was switching it to the Chinese version. We chose to use the iOS app and we successfully verified the passengers for our China Railway 12306 accounts.
With verifying the email address for each passenger, we never managed to get the status for the passengers’ email addresses to verified status. But it doesn’t seem to impact on adding passengers when buying tickets.
Extra information and thoughts
The version which we found the most buggy was the iOS app since it provided no way to view the accounts screen to allow us to get to the identity verification screen. The Android app was not so buggy. It was the one we used to try get through the verification process. We could view our accounts page and it had things that allowed us to attempt verifying our identity and email address. This is the platform we were more comfortable in using to purchase our train tickets because it just didn’t have such big issues like the iOS app. The website felt like it was the least buggy since we could access the accounts page and we could get to places allowing us to verify our email address and our identity. It provided the page where we could upload our verification photos. But of course, it fell short in failing to upload our verification photos. In terms of which language version was better to use in the verification process, it’s definitely the Chinese version. It helps you verify your account and passengers more easily. However, the English version is the way to go for registering an account because it means you don’t have to enter a phone number which had to be from China, Hong Kong, Macao, or Taiwan at this present time. It’s just not too good for the verification process—at least it wasn’t very good for us when we tried to use it for the verification process.
Though each platform have either account accessing and/or display issues during the signup and verification stages, you should find that, after you’ve completed verification, all platforms should no longer have these issues.
A note about email addresses. We previously mentioned that successfully verifying an email address is not limited to using a certain type of email address as contact information for your China Railway 12306 account. But one thing we found out when we got into China is that certain email addresses couldn’t receive or send on a Chinese Internet/mobile data connection. The two that couldn’t send or receive emails were Gmail and Yahoo email addresses. The ones that could send and receive are Microsoft email addresses such as Outlook and we imagine the older discontinued ones like Hotmail, Live, and MSN. We tried sending an email from an outlook email address to a Gmail email address and the email was pending until we got back into our home country where the emails finally sent and came into the inbox.
It appears that there isn’t a way to update ID information even though the app has an edit button in the English version for you to click. When you click the edit button, you are led to the passport information, but the fields are all uneditable. So, if you have a new passport due to the previous one having expired or maybe lost, stolen, or damaged, there isn’t a way to update the information on your China Railway 12306 account and it seems to be set this way by the app which doesn’t seem very helpful for ID documents which have a change of ID number when it expires or a new one is issued for reasons mentioned above.
We mentioned at the beginning of the blog post that we encountered payment issues when trying to buy tickets through the China Railway 12306 app. Our issue came about when finalising the payment using 国际卡 (international credit card) as the payment method to purchase our tickets. So, we had no problems selecting the tickets, no problems adding passengers, no problems selecting 国际卡 (international credit card) as the payment method, got the 2FA code sent through to our mobile phone and entered it into China Railway 12306 app which successfully brought us to the screen to finalise the payment and confirm the purchase. We press the button to confirm the purchase of the train tickets and the purchase fails. We could see our tickets in the ‘Orders’ tab in the ‘To be paid’ section. Seats were assigned with all the usual train information, but we couldn’t finalise payment for these train tickets using our international credit card even though it was listed as an accepted credit card on the app. It failed payment when using the Chinese version of the app and it failed when using the English version of the app. It was our first time attempting to purchase China Railway 12306 tickets through the app, first time attempting to purchase tickets with that international credit card, and the attempt was made after landing in China after setting the account up and verifying the account in our home country.
We went to one of the China Railway stations to get some help on why we couldn’t purchase tickets through the app. We handed our phone and let the ticketing officer try purchasing the tickets we wanted through the app and they were also baffled why the payment failed and we heard the ticketing officer express their confusion with a colleague. The issue doesn’t appear to be the international credit card we used to purchase as it worked perfectly fine with our Alipay and WeChat and we were able to use it to purchase high speed rail tickets the old fashioned way—the old fashioned way being inserting it into a POS terminal which the ticketing office had for customers to use to pay for tickets.
We know the unsuccessful payment was not due to not verifying the account with a Chinese phone number because it failed payment when we didn’t bind a Chinese mobile number to the account. It also failed payment when we did bind a Chinese mobile number to the account and the Chinese mobile number was verified on the account.
We do wonder whether the purchase with an international credit card would’ve successfully gone through if we bought the train tickets whilst still in our home country and not in China, whether it has something to do with using the international credit card in the China Railway 12306 app on a Chinese mobile data connection (no VPN active).
The reason why we wonder about this is because we had no issues using an international credit card on trip.com to book hotel rooms whilst in our home country, but just like the tickets in the China Railway 12306 app, we struggled to book hotel rooms via trip.com with an international credit card when we landed in China. The international credit card we used to book hotel rooms on trip.com after landing in China was an accepted credit card and it was never used to make payment on trip.com. The result was our order for the hotel rooms that we made in China went to the ‘To be paid’ section after the international credit card failed payment. We could only successfully book hotel rooms on trip.com in China using the same international credit card we used when we booked hotel rooms on the site in our home country. Therefore, it makes us wonder if we needed to have purchased the high speed rail tickets using the international credit card whilst in our home country for the purchase to go through successfully. Doing this, we wonder if it then would allow us to use this same international credit card to purchase railway tickets after landing in China on the China Railway 12306 app on a Chinese mobile data connection (no VPN active).
