I just got my passport back from the Chinese Embassy today, and they did something that frustrates and mystifies me: when they put in the tourist visa, they placed it five pages after the last full page–in other words, they skipped over four blank pages in my passport that now will be avoided and unused in the future, as immigration officials usually place stamps after the last used page. Essentially, the Chinese embassy just wasted one quarter of the empty pages in my passport. And this is not the first time–several years ago, in my last passport, a Japanese immigration official did the exact same thing, though for a one-year working visa.

On top of that, a simple tourist visa is now an adhesive label which takes up a whole page–twice the size of a 3-year working visa from Japan–further filling up the passport. A simple 9-day trip to China is taking up 5 of 16 free pages in a brand-new passport, meaning I’m probably going to have to get replacement pages before the passport is even halfway to its expiration date.

Has anyone else had the skip-four-pages thing done to them?