This is the first Morgan ever in China, and may just be allowed on the roads before another year is out. She is worth every second of the wait. At least that is what we thought after calls with the factory said that they hadn't heard of a Morgan being shipped into China. However, within 3 months we heard of 1 other, then a 2nd located in Beijing & Wenzhou. Still, this was a proud moment for us; the delivery of our Roadster to Beijing. I ordered the hand built V6 Roadster in British Racing Green in the spring of 2010 from the world's greatest sports car company; Morgan Motor Company. Morgan have prided themselves on making affordable, high performance, and unique sports cars since 1910. The process of buying and shipping a handbuilt car 5732 miles from
Malvern Links, England to Shanghai, China, is both simple and complicated. As the owner of a Wholly Owned Foreign Enterprise I am allowed to a have one company car. Naturally as a British family man I elected to buy a Morgan sports car. Each car is custom ordered and illicits an almost surreal amount of passion bourne of the amazing driver experience. Seated in hand made leather seats with wooden trim and that stretching hood with louvres which cool the 240 bhp Vtec unit. It is at customs that the real China experience starts. Our car, MKM1 (middle kingdom mog) sailed on a Cosco ship Ningbo on the 6.11 and arrived in Shanghai 12.12.10; costing a reasonable GBP2,000. Our first issue arose when it transpired that although I was the owner of the car, I had less than 12 months of work visa in my passport. We were faced with sending the car back to the UK until August 2011 until we found that we could transfer it to my wife, Wei, who is an employee of the company too and has a 12 month visa. At the port when the container was opened there was a look of astonishment and a reluctance to even touch the car. Our first challenge came when the officers couldn't believe the invoice value - how could such a car be such a reasonable price. Ah the beauty of currency depreciation! MKM1 sat in customs for nearly 2 months but finally was allowed through by incredulous officials. In the final reckoning the officers went online to research the car and pricing, unable to track down the final costs they added a reasonable 20% to our declared invoice and asked us to pay that - or to show our HSBC bank statements to prove how much we had paid. Customs took 3 bites of our cherry:
- - Emissions tax based on engine size @ 12%
- - Customs tax based on value @ 25%
- - VAT @17%
But wait, the VAT is calculated on the combined total: base (adjusted) price + emissions + customs tax + shipping cost = tax bill . Overall we have nearly doubled the cost of our 'affordable' sports car. The fun part is that it isn't possible to pay the customs in Shanghai from Beijing as they provide a slip of paper which the bank has to sign to say that the funds have been paid into the Shanghai customs bank account. After writing a letter to our bank to explain why we are withdrawing so much of our own money, we are able to transfer this to a family member in Shanghai who takes her pocket book with her to the bank counter in Shanghai. We duly receive an envelope sealed with red ink to say that MKM1 can be released and she is onto the truck. Once in Beijing MKM1 is given a moment to stretch her legs before the next leg of administration begins. The local customs bureau needs to give us a release form to apply for a local vehicle registration. On inspection of the contents of the red sealed envelope a 2' something year old in gold buttoned uniform and thick rim spectacles finds that one space for the engine number has been left blank by the customs officer in Shanghai. It is not our fault but it is our problem - no engine number on the document, no release form; apparently they are concerned of the practice of shipping in low emission engines which are switched for high powered units later. As we climb back into the Yarwood stone leather interior, I fire up the V6 240 bhp engine which draws all the officers to take photos and tell me how pretty MKM1 is in British racing green; but no amount of admiration melts my annoyance that we have yet another few miles to go before open roads are ahead of us. I park up in our garage and find the engine number that the officers couldn't find, and we send photos back to Shanghai in the hope that they will re-open the envelope and sign without demanding that they see the car again over 666 miles away to the south east. Assuming we get the release to apply for a vehicle registration, we have still one or two more barriers. On December 24th the Beijing government initiated a lottery for license plates and set a limit at 240,000 for 2011. Currently there are some 4.8m cars registered and so I can't fault the rationale, but the timing couldn't have been worse. One vehicle per person. Our current car is registered to Erika, and due to the Passport issue, so is the Morgan. Then there is the issue of a local duty to pay of some 5% of our import value. The blessing so far is that we haven't had to pass any homologation process, which are the safety and emission tests for a vehicle to be allowed on the roads. This is because, we believe, MKM1 is a company vehicle and not for resale (at least for 12 months by law). As we are trying to become the agency for Morgan in China, this issue may well arise later. Still, for now we enjoy short drives around our compound, at no more than 10 mph; probably a good pace for a centenarian which has travelled over 6,000 miles. View the MKM1
slideshow
This is the first Morgan ever in China, and may just be allowed on the roads before another year is out. She is worth every second of the wait. At least that is what we thought after calls with the factory said that they hadn't heard of a Morgan being shipped into China. However, within 3 months we heard of 1 other, then a 2nd located in Beijing & Wenzhou. Still, this was a proud moment for us; the delivery of our Roadster to Beijing. I ordered the hand built V6 Roadster in British Racing Green in the spring of 2010 from the world's greatest sports car company; Morgan Motor Company. Morgan have prided themselves on making affordable, high performance, and unique sports cars since 1910. The process of buying and shipping a handbuilt car 5732 miles from Malvern Links, England to Shanghai, China, is both simple and complicated. As the owner of a Wholly Owned Foreign Enterprise I am allowed to a have one company car. Naturally as a British family man I elected to buy a Morgan sports car. Each car is custom ordered and illicits an almost surreal amount of passion bourne of the amazing driver experience. Seated in hand made leather seats with wooden trim and that stretching hood with louvres which cool the 240 bhp Vtec unit. It is at customs that the real China experience starts. Our car, MKM1 (middle kingdom mog) sailed on a Cosco ship Ningbo on the 6.11 and arrived in Shanghai 12.12.10; costing a reasonable GBP2,000. Our first issue arose when it transpired that although I was the owner of the car, I had less than 12 months of work visa in my passport. We were faced with sending the car back to the UK until August 2011 until we found that we could transfer it to my wife, Wei, who is an employee of the company too and has a 12 month visa. At the port when the container was opened there was a look of astonishment and a reluctance to even touch the car. Our first challenge came when the officers couldn't believe the invoice value - how could such a car be such a reasonable price. Ah the beauty of currency depreciation! MKM1 sat in customs for nearly 2 months but finally was allowed through by incredulous officials. In the final reckoning the officers went online to research the car and pricing, unable to track down the final costs they added a reasonable 20% to our declared invoice and asked us to pay that - or to show our HSBC bank statements to prove how much we had paid. Customs took 3 bites of our cherry: 
