Getting Married In Taiwan (not HK) WITHOUT leaving the country (Letter of No Trace)

yes that was our feeling - but be prepared for a battle! i think we were unlucky to have a particularly vigilant clerk who spotted that th certificate if no trace left a 2 year gap. Someone else might not. good luck - do us a favor afterwards and update this forum with your experience after so it stays current.

yes but the same principle should apply and actually did for me in the end -just swear u r single - thats all they can do anyway!

I have emailed for the letter of single status., but I have not had a reply. I go back to England next month for 2 weeks, is this something I can go and collect?

yes u should be able to collect it - beat to call them.

I have called them but I didnā€™t need to pay for anythingā€¦ is that correct?

Hi! So my ā€˜Letter of no traceā€™ has arrived finally but they put it FAO: Mr and Mrs Howe (my parents) but it says tracing the marriage certificate of Emily Howe. Will this be an issue later?

u mean they made a mistake wirh the name?

No my name is correct ā€˜Emily Howeā€™ but it says at the top FAO: Mr and Mrs Howe (thatā€™s my parents)ā€¦ But the actual marriage search is for me in my name. I have sent it to the FCO now. I was wondering if it would be a problem that my parents names were on there.

It should be ok - the whole process is not exactly an exact science so be prepared to argue your corner hard.

I would just like to give a big THANK YOU to youqian, aswell as all other contributors, for their detailed instructions on how to obtain correct documentation allowing a UK national to marry a Taiwanese woman in Taiwan. I followed the steps, obtaining the letter of single status (from 16yrs after DOB to now) and the apostile, verified by the Taipei representative office in the UK, then off to Taiwan to be verified by the ministry of foreign affairs, then to the courts to be notarized (along with the Chinese translation) and finally to the local registry office. As this was a very local office in Zhushan (Nantou County) the woman working in there were very excited and did their best to register our marriage and provide us with multiple copies of Chinese and English certificates. They did not question the fact that the letter of single status was only valid up to 18 months prior to now. We encountered no issues, due to the detailed instructions in this thread.
Thanks again :grin:

Unexpectedly our baby girl was born two weeks early and we didnt get married until one week after she was born. Hospital refuses to put me as the father on the birth certificate even though we are now married. Damn shame but Im hoping the HMPO will accept the Household Registration which has us listed as married parents of our daughter (we have several english copies)

The household registration was the ONLY document U.K. passport offices wanted from my side to prove parentage after I wasted a journey to Liverpool with birth certificate in hand so if youā€™re on that then congratulations. If you apply for your childā€™s passport in person in the UK you might encounter resistance from the frontline person whoā€™s expecting a birth certificate. Insist that the HHR document is the only valid proof of parenthood from Taiwan and escalate if necessary.
Donā€™t bother applying for a British birth certificate from overseas as itā€™s a waste of money and British authorities themselves donā€™t recognize it as a valid way for you to prove youā€™re the parent of your child. It only seems to be useful in other countries (like Canada) for applying for schools - and even then I probably could have used the Taiwanese one.

Hmmā€¦ rereading my old post here (UK Child Passport Application (note FCO Birth Certificate for British Citizen born overseas is worthless)) Iā€™m wrong in what I said above. The passport office wanted the hospital birth certificate with the HHR document.

I really hope that you are wrong as its not possible for me to get added to the Taiwanese birth certificate. How did you obtain a FCO birth cert? Last resort is a DNA test but that will cost an arm and a leg.
sighā€¦

The instructions for applying for an FCO birth certificate are on the web somewhere. They want the hospital birth certificate and the marriage certificate - I think if the child was born out of wedlock you need the DNA test, but as I said in that link, the FCO birth certificate is a big waste of money anyway and not at all useful for a first-time passport.

Please keep the group updated if youā€™re successful in applying for a passport for your little girl with just the household registration documents, and also let people know what you had to do if youā€™re not.

Has anyone done this recently? Iā€™ve just gone through the entire process as described, we went to the household registry office on Saturday to register our marrige and the guy there noticed the 18 month gap in the letter and is refusing to budge. He dug out some marriges involving a uk citizen that had certificates of no impediment, and I pointed out they had residency in the uk, and that itā€™s simply impossible for me to get one, being a resident of Taiwan, and the only letter that I am able to get is the Letter of no trace. He faffed around for ages, told my fiancee that heā€™d ask his boss on Monday, than called back today to say that itā€™s impossible.

Iā€™m pretty angry with the whole thing, but I figured Iā€™d ask if anyone had done this recently, and I can point him towards their documents, or alternatively does anyone know how I might excelate this futher up the chain of command. A little bit desperate here, quite simply donā€™t have the time to take 5 days off work to go to Hong Kong to sort this out, and, quite frankly I donā€™t see why I should have too, itā€™s a joke.

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Meant to update this a while back, but forgot about it, hereā€™s a quick rundown of what happened:

So we went through the above rigmarole on a Saturday when there werenā€™t any upper management there, on the Monday some level of supervisor gave us the shitty advice about going to Hong Kong, my wife got pretty pissed off with him and basically implied that weā€™d just go around trying different household registry offices until someone just let us get married. I think that made him go up the food chain another step, because on the Tuesday his boss called and asked about the certificate of no impediment, and why I couldnā€™t get it, and also why couldnā€™t I just lie to the uk government and say I was a resident of the UK. At any rate, he called again on Thursday, and said he had decided that we would be allowed to get married using the same method as a poster above; I sign a bit of paper that says Iā€™m not married and that if I am the marriage is voided. Then he gave us a date when we could go in, we went in, signed all the paperwork, including the statement that Iā€™m not already married that they drafted for me, and I am now happy to say that we are legally married under Taiwanese law.

Not sure if we would go about it in the same way were we to do it all over again, but it is currently still possible, as of September 2019, for a British citizen to get married in Taiwan without going back to the UK, or go to Hong Kong, you might just have to fight your corner a bit.

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Typical Taiwanese half-assed chadbuduoism that the sworn declaration is permissible for the 18-month gap in the letter of no trace, but you canā€™t make a sworn declaration for your entire period of adulthood and instead have to spend time and money on a document that is essentially completely :banana:ing worthless. You could have gotten married in 15 different countries and the British authorities wouldnā€™t have a clue anyway - the entire process is effectively based on your word that youā€™re not already married somewhere else, same as it is for people from every other country except Britain.

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Oh yea, I mean, the letter of no trace wasnā€™t even used in the end, but, as a poster above said, I donā€™t think he would have agreed to let us get married without it. From what my wife told me the final guy that called was the head of the Xindian office, and he seemed pretty intrested in how things actually worked for UK citizens. Maybe if enough higher ups are made aware of it the procedures might change, but Iā€™m not holding my breath.

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Extremely late reply but better late than never. Turns out that being listed on the household registration transcript was enough, HMPO didnā€™t need me to be named on her birth cert. Needed an insane amount of other docs though (my birth cert and name change form, both my parents birth certs, colour copy of every page in my UK and babies Taiwan passport & declaration form) By the time she was 6 weeks old she had two new passports :smiley:

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Well done! Thatā€™s fantastic news for anyone else in the same situation as you were in!

Ah, yes, I had to provide all those other documents as well. For one of my parentsā€™ birth certificates I had to apply for a new one which at least was reasonably inexpensive and arrived quickly.