Wills and Will Notarization in China for Foreigners

Which of these two problems is yours

Almost everyone who reaches this page is in one of two situations, and the two need close to opposite things.

• You own something in China and want a will that will actually work. A flat in the city your family came from, a bank account, a share in a company. You may be living in China on a residence permit, or not have been back in years.
• Someone has died and you are holding a will made outside China. An English will with two witnesses, a Canadian one, a notarial testament from Spain or Germany — and a Chinese bank, notary office or property registry has told you it is not enough.

The first is planning work, done at a notary office in China. The second is a document-and-evidence problem that ends at a notary office or in a Chinese court. This page covers both, in that order.

The assumption that costs the most

A will made in London, Toronto, Sydney or Riyadh can be perfectly valid and still move nothing in China. There are two reasons, and families usually meet them together, at the worst moment.

Where there is no will, which law applies is decided asset by asset. For immovable property — a flat, a house, land use rights — Chinese law applies because the property is in China. For movable property — deposits, securities, personal effects — the law of the deceased's habitual residence at death applies. One estate can be split between two legal systems. Where there is a valid will, a different rule governs which law measures the will, and the substance still has to be settled asset by asset — so the allocation is worth confirming at the outset rather than assumed. Either way, a will drafted with only one legal system in mind has to survive both.

No Chinese institution transfers anything on the strength of a will alone. The registry that changes the name on the property certificate, and the bank that releases the deposit, act on a notarial certificate of inheritance rights or on a court judgment. The will is evidence inside that procedure; it is not the procedure, which is set out on the China inheritance page.

The foreign will: form, evidence and authentication

Is it formally valid here?

More often favourable than clients expect. The Chinese conflicts rule on the form of wills is generous: a will is formally valid if it complies with the law of the place where it was made, or of the testator's habitual residence, or of his nationality — measured either when he made it or when he died. An English will with two witnesses, or a Spanish notarial testament, normally clears that hurdle on its own terms.

Does it govern the Chinese assets?

Formal validity is not the same as effect. For real property in China, Chinese succession law governs the substance: what the testator could dispose of, the necessary share, who has forfeited the right to inherit. A clause offending those rules is trimmed even though the will stands.

Why the bank and the registry refuse it

Because the will alone proves nothing they are permitted to act on. A Chinese notary office or court needs a chain:

1. Proof of death — the death certificate, authenticated.
2. Proof that this is the last will and that its dispositions are as they appear — in a probate jurisdiction, normally the grant of probate or letters of administration, not the will by itself.
3. Proof of who the heirs and beneficiaries are and how they are related to the deceased, including relatives the will does not mention.
4. A certified Chinese translation of each document, from an agency whose seal the office accepts. A family member's translation is refused, however good it is.
5. Where all interested heirs cooperate, the notary office can issue a certificate of inheritance rights. Where one refuses, cannot be found or contests the will, that route closes and the matter goes to the court where the property is.

Heir, or legatee? The distinction has a deadline

Chinese law separates a statutory heir — a spouse, child or parent, and the others in the statutory orders — from a legatee, meaning someone left something by will who is not in those orders: a friend, a charity, an unmarried partner, or a nephew where children survive. The distinction carries a trap. A legatee must positively accept the gift within 60 days of learning of it, or it lapses; an heir is treated as accepting unless they renounce. If the will leaves Chinese assets to someone outside the statutory orders, that clock has to be respected from the start, and it needs confirming against the current provision — I flag it in every will matter where a legatee is named.

What actually gets the apostille

The Hague Apostille Convention has been in force for mainland China since 7 November 2023, so a public document from another contracting state needs only an apostille from that state, with no Chinese consular step. Documents from non-contracting states still go through consular legalisation.

The distinction that catches almost everyone: the will your father signed is a private document. It cannot be apostilled as it stands. What can be is a public act relating to it — a court's grant of probate, a certified copy of the will admitted to probate, or a notarial act. Where there is no probate procedure, the route is usually a notarial attestation of the will and the surrounding facts, and it is that notarial act which is apostilled. Get this wrong and you pay for an authentication a Chinese notary office hands straight back. See apostilles for documents used in China.

A foreign executor's authority stops at the border

A grant appointing you executor gives you powers under that country's law, and those powers do not automatically carry across the border: a Chinese bank's or registry's counter staff act on documents they recognise, and a foreign grant on its own is rarely one of them. In practice the file is therefore built around the beneficiaries — proof of who they are, and, where you act for them, a power of attorney from each, notarised and then apostilled or legalised. Whether the estate is instead handled through an estate administrator under the Civil Code is one of the things I assess at the outset. What a usable power of attorney must contain is in powers of attorney for use in China.

The forms of will Chinese law recognises

Book Six of the Civil Code, in force since 1 January 2021, governs succession and recognises six forms of will. Formal defects, not badly chosen words, are the usual reason a will fails here.

• Notarial will. Made before a notary, who verifies identity and capacity, records the process, and keeps the will in the office's archive.
• Self-written (holograph) will. Written entirely in the testator's own hand, signed and dated by him. A will typed on a computer and then signed is not a holograph will, however clear the intention: it is a printed will, and needs witnesses.
• Will written by another person. Two witnesses must be present, and the writer, the other witness and the testator all sign and date it.
• Printed will. A form the Civil Code added. The testator and two witnesses sign and date it, and the signature and date go on every page, not only the last.
• Audio or video will. The testator and two witnesses must each appear in the recording and state their name and the date. A voice memo recorded alone is not a will.
• Oral will. Only in an emergency, with two witnesses present, and it lapses once the emergency passes and the testator can again make a will in writing or by recording.

Who may witness matters as much as how many. A witness cannot lack capacity or be unable to express their own intention, cannot benefit under the will, and cannot have an interest in a beneficiary — which excludes beneficiaries' spouses, children and parents. Asking two of the children who inherit to sign as witnesses is the most reliable way to destroy a home-drafted will.

"My parents made a notarised will in 2015"

Under the old Succession Law a notarial will sat at the top of a hierarchy: it could be revoked or altered only by another notarial will, so a later handwritten will lost to it. The Civil Code abolished that rule. Where several wills conflict, the last one prevails, whatever form each took.

• If your parent notarised a will in 2015 and wrote a different one by hand in 2022, the 2022 will governs the conflicting parts — provided it meets the formal requirements above. Most homemade later wills do not, which is why these cases end in court.
• If you are the beneficiary of the notarised will, you can no longer treat it as unassailable. Other heirs may produce a later document, and a notary office will not issue an inheritance certificate while there is a real dispute about which will is last.
• The date of death matters, not the date of the will. Where the death occurred before the Civil Code took effect, the earlier law generally still governs that estate on this point. If your timeline straddles 1 January 2021, check it rather than assume.

A notarial will is still worth making — not because it outranks anything now, but because it is the form least vulnerable to attack: capacity was assessed by an official at the time, the process was recorded, and the original sits in an archive rather than a drawer.

Making a will at a Chinese notary office

You have to be there yourself

Making a will is a strictly personal act. You cannot do it by power of attorney, have a relative do it for you, or instruct me to do it in your place. A power of attorney can carry everything else in a Chinese estate matter — the inheritance procedure, the registration, a later sale — but not the making of the will itself.

Chinese embassies and consulates perform notarial acts for use in China, but which acts a given post offers — will notarisation in particular — varies, and several do not offer it. Confirm with the post covering your address before planning around it.

What to bring

• Passport, plus your residence permit or visa if you are in China
• Proof of marital status: marriage certificate, divorce judgment or settlement agreement, or evidence of single or widowed status
• The full legal name, nationality and ID of each person you intend to benefit, exactly as on their own document — a Chinese registry cannot act on "my nephew Tony"
• Ownership documents for each asset: the property certificate with its registration number and address, bank and account details, company registration number
• Any will you have already made, including one made abroad
• Where age or illness could later be used to attack capacity, a medical assessment dated close to the will

Language, cost and time

The deed is issued in Chinese. If you do not read Chinese, the office will not simply take your signature on it: an interpreter, usually one the office recognises, must attend, translate the deed and sign. The Chinese deed is the operative document — what it says is what your heirs get — so have it read back to you by someone other than the drafter.

This is fixed-fee work: the notary tariff, the interpreter, and legal fees for drafting and for the ownership and marital-property checks that come first. Tariffs are set locally, so ask the office for its schedule in writing. The appointment is one visit; the preparation is where the time goes.

What a will can and cannot do

You can only give away what is yours

The commonest substantive defect is a will disposing of a whole flat when the testator owns half of it. Property acquired during a marriage is, by default, joint marital property, and each spouse can dispose of their own share and no more. A will that overreaches is cut back to the share actually held, which usually produces exactly the co-ownership it was written to prevent. Check the registry record first.

The share that must be reserved

China has no general forced heirship: you are not obliged to leave fixed fractions to your children. But an heir who both lacks the ability to work and has no source of income must be left a necessary share, and a will leaving such a person nothing is adjusted to that extent. A share is also reserved for a child conceived but not yet born when the succession opens. If a dependent adult child, a parent living on your support or a disabled sibling is involved, say so before drafting.

Administrators, and agreements that outrank a will

The Civil Code allows an estate administrator, and an executor named in a will serves in that role. Name someone in China, or who can get there: without an appointment the heirs act jointly, and heirs in four countries who must all appear or all send authenticated documents are why these matters run past a year. Separately, a legacy-support agreement — an undertaking to support the testator in life in return for the estate — outranks a will, so it must be found before anyone relies on one.

Two wills, and the clause that quietly cancels one

Where there are assets in more than one country, a separate China-only will is often the practical answer: in Chinese, on file at a notary office, identifying the flat by its registration number, producible without waiting on a foreign court. That works, so long as each will is drafted knowing the other exists.

The trap is the revocation clause. "I revoke all wills and testamentary dispositions heretofore made by me" is boilerplate in English-language wills, and it does what it says. Sign a new home-country will in 2027 containing that sentence and you may have revoked the Chinese will you notarised in 2026, with nobody intending it and nobody noticing until you are dead. Limit each will expressly to the assets it covers, and tell both drafters the other document exists.

Mistakes that decide these cases

• Relying on the home-country will and doing nothing else. The most expensive item here, because it surfaces after death, when nothing can be repaired.
• Typing the will and signing it, believing that makes it self-written. Anything printed needs two qualified witnesses signing and dating every page — and beneficiaries, or their spouses, children and parents, cannot be those witnesses.
• Describing the asset loosely. "My apartment in Shanghai" cannot be matched by a registry that works from certificate numbers.
• Leaving the only original abroad and bringing photocopies. Notary offices and courts work from originals or officially certified copies.
• Expecting a notary office to resolve an ambiguity. It does not interpret; it declines. The family then litigates a sentence that took ten minutes to write.
• Letting years pass. Statutory time limits apply to inheritance claims, and evidence about capacity and about who was alive on the date of death gets harder every year. Who inherits where no valid will survives: inheritance rights of foreigners in China.

Fees, and what I do not take on

This work is charged at a fixed fee or hourly. Inheritance and family matters cannot lawfully be taken on contingency in China, so "no result, no fee" on an estate is either not a PRC lawyer speaking or not an inheritance matter. Beyond legal fees, budget for the notary tariff, an interpreter where required, certified translation by the page, and apostille or legalisation at home.

What I do not take:

• Advice on your own country's law — probate, estate tax, reporting at home. I am licensed in the PRC and work alongside your lawyer or accountant there.
• A will for someone whose capacity is genuinely in question without a proper contemporaneous assessment. A will that will be set aside is worse than no will.
• Estates too small to carry the fixed costs. Translation, notarial fees and authentication do not scale down with the asset.
• Enquiries with no identifiable asset. "There is family property somewhere in Fujian" is not a matter I can open, and I do not run speculative asset searches.
• Anything asking me to reconstruct or date a document after the death it is supposed to predate.
• One heir against another where I already act for the family jointly. If a dispute develops mid-matter I will say so, and one side will need separate counsel.

What to send if you want this assessed

Making a will: what you own in China, with certificate or account identifiers; your marital history with dates, and when each asset was acquired; who you want to benefit, with full legal names and nationalities; whether any potential heir is a minor, disabled or dependent on you; whether and when you can travel; and any will you have already made, anywhere.

Holding a foreign will: the will and any grant of probate, scanned in full; the death certificate; the deceased's nationality and habitual residence at death; what the Chinese assets are and where; every surviving relative in the statutory orders, whether the will mentions them or not; and what the bank, notary office or registry actually told you.

I read that before quoting, and I will tell you if the matter is not worth running.