VehiclesDB

China license plate: Small car

Issued today 1992 to today. Standard plates for car and van, issued by 公安部交通管理局 (Traffic Management Bureau, Ministry of Public Security). One of 22 China license plates.

The ordinary blue plate on most of China's cars since the 92-pattern began, province character, office letter, five characters, and a raised dot the standard says may be "embossed and coloured the same way" as the rest.

China license plate, Small car (1992 to today), sample 京A·88562
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Format, years and the law

Format
L99999, for example 京A·88562 (L is any letter, 9 any digit)

Two characters do all the decoding: the Han character is the province, 京 Beijing, 沪 Shanghai, 粤 Guangdong, and the letter is the issuing office within it, 粤A Guangzhou, 粤B Shenzhen. In the four municipalities the letter is only a batch: 京B is not a district.

京
北京市 (Beijing)
沪
上海市 (Shanghai)
粤
广东省 (Guangdong Province)
O
省、自治区公安厅车辆管理所 (the provincial public-security department's own vehicle office, the "O plate")

The format above follows the issuing rules: a registration that fits it is one this series could have issued.

Years issued
1992 to today. Still issued.
Vehicle class
Standard: the default series issued to private road vehicles. Issued for car and van.
Colours
Characters #FFFFFF Background #1C3F94
Size
440 × 140 mm · every country's size
About this plate
The five-position serial is sourced twice over, GA 36-2007 表 3's 五位数 column and the Ministry's 2016 NEV announcement, which contrasts the ordinary plate's five positions with the NEV plate's six.
How numbers are issued
combinations open in 表 3 order once the previous is 60% consumed (§ 5.9.2 a)); the inference is one-sided and no year claim is made from it

Legal basis and sources

  1. web.archive.org https://web.archive.org/web/20150701102419/http://www.hngy.gov.cn/sitepublish/site1/wsbs/lyfwzl/jtfw/jdc/jdcfw/conten...
  2. web.archive.org https://web.archive.org/web/20161122160811/http://www.mps.gov.cn/n2254098/n4904352/c5550094/content.html
  3. hbba.sacinfo.org.cn https://hbba.sacinfo.org.cn/stdDetail/12b7710b682f0e13dfc423a325751920

This plate in your app

The series id is cn-small-car-1992. The API returns its format, validation, colours and designs with the rest of China's series:

curl -s https://vehiclesdb.com/api/v1/plates/cn \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $VEHICLESDB_API_KEY" \
  | jq '.series[] | select(.id == "cn-small-car-1992")'
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