Travelling To Hong Kong and mainland China.

I hope to visit Hong Kong next year. I would expect when there to also visit Macau and mainland China. When applying for my visa to travel, is it the one visa that I need or do I have to get 3 different visas?

1 Visa will do.

Thanks. How long will the Chinese embassy in Dublin hold on to my passport when I apply for a visa?

The embassy in Dublin is very efficient.... or was from my experience in 2010 anyway. I think you will need a multiple entry visa if you plan on exiting and re-entering mainland China. You can get the Hong Kong and Macau visa on border (on Irish passport). All this info is from 2010.

Thanks. Probably Hong Kong to mainland China then back to Hong Kong then flight home.

Can I purchase Chinese currency from my bank in Ireland? Is there a limit on the amount of currency that I can purchase and is there a limit on the amount of Chinese currency that I can bring to China?

TomOC said:

I think you will need a multiple entry visa if you plan on exiting and re-entering mainland China.

Click to expand...

Do I have to visit the Chinese Visa section on the Merrion Road to get a visa or can this be done by post?

Is it generally one visa that is issued if I want to enter Hong Kong, then to China, then back to Hong Kong?

When applying for a visa do I have to give a detailed itinerary of places that I intend to visit? Names of hotels and dates of stay etc

Only seeing this now... I am not sure, I did it in person but you probably can post it. Yes I would expect a single entry Chinese visa for that. If you were going mainland China then Hong Kong then mainland China you would need a double entry visa. Your passport will be stamped in Hong Kong with the length you can stay. I just put in a very rough route of a few cities, no hotels or anything and the route changed a lot with no trouble when I was leaving. Again it was 8 years ago I was there.
I got all local currency when I entered China so I don't know the limits allowed.

Update. We got our visas. We were required to call to the Chinese Embassy Visa section in person to hand in our visa application forms which we downloaded. We were queuing for about one hour. The queue stretches in to the back garden of the embassy. There was one person dealing with the applications. Many people had nor completed their forms correctly and were sent away. Some people took forever at the counter. Our forms were completed correctly. It took us about 2 minutes to have ours processed. We were told to call back in 5 days to collect with a €40 postal order for a single entry visa. When we called back we had to queue in a different queue. About 15 minutes for this one.
We live close to the embassy and we found the whole experience stressful. Many people had travelled from the far corners of the country. Some of these were sent away because their forms were not completed correctly.

As an aside, there are now (or will shortly be) direct flights from Dublin to Hong Kong and mainland China. Great to see.