How to get a Canton Fair invitation letter

The Canton Fair issues its own invitation letter, free of charge, to buyers who register through its online buyer service system. Depending on your passport, that letter alone can be enough to support a business (M) visa application — but whether it actually is enough depends on your country’s own consulate, not on the fair.

What the letter actually is — and isn’t

The invitation letter is issued by the fair’s organiser, China Foreign Trade Centre, and it exists for one purpose: to support a Chinese visa application. It is not an entry pass. Getting into the exhibition halls needs a buyer badge, which is a separate registration step and doesn’t require an invitation letter at all if your passport doesn’t need one for entry.

The letter is generated automatically by the buyer system the moment you submit a request — there’s no manual review, and you choose the template language yourself before printing or downloading it. The organiser’s own description of what it contains lists the applicant’s name, nationality, and company name and address. Because it’s assembled from a template rather than drafted and signed by a person, it almost certainly doesn’t carry a handwritten signature or an attached business licence — there’s no step in the automated process where either would normally be added. That matters, because a few countries’ consulates ask for exactly those things as part of an ordinary business invitation.

How to apply

You request the invitation letter from inside your own buyer account, after registering with the fair’s buyer service system (buyer.cantonfair.org.cn). Some registration flows let you request your buyer badge and your invitation letter in the same step, so it’s worth checking that option before submitting two separate applications. Invitation letters are issued in 3–7 business days. They're optional for entry — a badge alone gets you in — and only needed as part of a business (M) visa application.

Apply as soon as your buyer account is approved rather than waiting until close to your travel dates. The reason isn’t the letter itself — it’s what comes after: you still need to book a visa appointment and go through your own consulate’s processing time, which is usually the longer part of the whole process.

One detail that matters more than it looks: you can apply for the letter up to five times within a single session, and each new application replaces the previous one, making it invalid. That cuts both ways. If you change your travel plans, generate a fresh copy before your appointment rather than bringing an earlier printout. But once you’ve already submitted a copy to your consulate, don’t request a new one just to have a spare — doing so invalidates the exact copy your application is built on, and the button gives no warning that it does. If you need an extra printout, print another copy of the same file rather than generating a new one. Whether a consulate actually re-checks a document already in hand isn’t something this guide knows — treat it as an easy mistake worth avoiding, not a guaranteed rejection.

What’s actually on the letter — check your own copy against this list

No official sample of the letter is published anywhere — it’s generated inside a personal account, and the fair doesn’t show a filled-in example on any of its own pages. What follows is based on the fair’s own description of the document’s contents, on how the system generates it, and on one image of a genuine letter from a past session reviewed for this guide — not on an official specimen, and it’s marked accordingly.

By how the letter is built, here’s what it does and doesn’t carry:

• A round stamp reading “邀请函专用章” (a stamp used specifically for invitations) — likely present, based on a genuine letter reviewed for this guide, though the image quality couldn’t confirm its colour.
• A handwritten signature from a named person — almost certainly absent. The letter is template-generated the instant you submit the request, with no manual step where a person would sign it.
• A business licence for the inviting organisation, or its registration number — not attached, and not part of the letter’s contents by the fair’s own description.
• Your passport number, or your personal travel dates — not confirmed to appear; the only dates on the letter appear to be the general session dates, the same for every buyer, not dates specific to your trip.

This matters because a small number of consulates — including India’s and Türkiye’s — ask for a business licence, a handwritten Chinese signature, or personal travel dates as part of their normal invitation requirements, without carving out an exception for trade fair invitations. If your consulate is one of them, running your own letter against this list tells you before your appointment whether you’re missing something, rather than finding out at the counter. Check India’s page or Türkiye’s page if either applies to you. For buyers applying through Bangladesh, Pakistan, or Nigeria, none of this is relevant — those consulates treat the fair’s invitation as its own category, separate from the rules for an ordinary company invitation.

A gap in the checklist isn’t the same as a refusal. None of this means your application will be rejected — how an individual consulate actually handles a fair invitation that’s missing a signature or a licence isn’t something this guide knows, and it isn’t something to guess at. It means preparing a backup is worth doing before you travel, not after a problem at the counter.

If the letter alone isn’t enough, there’s an official backup

Applying through your own buyer account isn’t the only official route. The fair also names economic and commercial counsellor’s offices at Chinese embassies and consulates as a channel for getting an invitation — worth knowing if your consulate wants something the auto-generated letter doesn’t provide. That’s a different thing from paying a sourcing agency to “arrange” your paperwork: the counsellor’s office is part of the Chinese government, not a fee-charging intermediary.

The invitation letter is not a visa document you should ever pay for

The letter is free, issued directly by the organiser, and requested from your own account — there’s no step in the process that requires a third party. If an agency offers to “arrange your Canton Fair invitation” for a fee, you’re paying for a service that costs nothing to do yourself. That doesn’t make the agency dishonest by definition, but it’s worth knowing exactly what you’re paying for before you agree to it, especially since some official consulate notices warn buyers directly against intermediaries promising a “guaranteed visa” in exchange for payment.

What’s next

Compare the M and L visa routes if you haven’t settled on a visa type yet, or go straight to your country’s page for the specific checklist your consulate uses.