China Post carries a very large share of the small parcels that leave Chinese marketplaces for the rest of the world, and its tracking language comes from the postal world rather than the courier world. "Office of exchange", "opening", "dispatching" are Universal Postal Union terms that every national post uses, which is why they read strangely to a shopper used to "in transit" and "out for delivery". This guide explains each China Post status in plain English, in order, and marks where the long silence normally happens.
Short answer: A China Post parcel moves from "collection" (the post office has it) through "opening" and "dispatching" (processed and sent toward the export gateway) to "departure from outward office of exchange" (cleared for export and leaving China). Then it goes quiet, often for one to three weeks, until "arrival at inward office of exchange" appears, which means it has landed in your country. From there the destination post takes over: customs, the local delivery office, and delivery. The quiet stretch after departure is normal and is not a lost parcel.
China Post statuses in English
| Status | What it means | Your move |
|---|---|---|
| Collection / Posting | The post office has received the parcel from the seller | None |
| Opening | The parcel has arrived at a processing centre and is being processed, or the mail bag containing it is being opened for sorting or inspection | None. Your parcel itself is not being opened |
| Dispatching | The parcel has left one office for the next, usually toward the export port city | None |
| Departure from outward office of exchange | Export processing is complete and the parcel is leaving China for the destination country | None. Expect silence for one to three weeks |
| Arrival at inward office of exchange | The parcel has arrived in the destination country | None yet. Customs and the local post come next |
| Handed over to customs / Released from customs | The destination country's customs stage | Watch for a duty or documents request |
| Arrival at delivery office / Out for delivery | The destination post has the parcel locally | Be reachable |
| Delivered | Done | Check the delivery detail if you do not have it |
The China-side statuses, in order
Collection. China Post's own help wording, via the tracking platforms that document it, is that "'Collection' means that your parcel has been received by the post office." The seller has handed it in.
Opening. This one alarms people. The documented meaning is that "the parcel has arrived at the local processing center and is being processed", or that "the large package which includes your parcel and others is opened by the China customs to check and shipped out", with the explicit note that "your parcel is not opened". It is a bag being opened at a sorting or customs step, not your item.
Dispatching. "The parcel leaves from the previous office for the China post export port in another city." Parcels are consolidated toward a handful of international gateways, so a parcel bought from a seller inland will show dispatching once or twice before it reaches one.
Departure from outward office of exchange. The last China-side scan and the one people search most. It "means that your parcel is ready for shipment to the destination country": export formalities are complete and the parcel is leaving, by air or by sea depending on the service. After this scan the tracking usually stops updating until the parcel is registered on arrival. Third-party trackers list dozens of wording variants for this same moment, including "Departure to country of destination", "Shipment handover to airline" and "Item has departed from country of origin". They all mean the same thing.
The destination-side statuses
Arrival at inward office of exchange. "Your parcel has arrived at the destination country." From here every scan comes from your national post, in its own wording: USPS, Royal Mail, Deutsche Post, Australia Post and the rest each have their own vocabulary, covered in our carrier tracking statuses library.
Customs. Wording varies by country: "handed over to customs", "held by import customs", "released from customs". Most parcels clear in hours to two or three days. If duty or tax is due, the destination post will ask you to pay before delivery; the causes and timings are in package stuck in customs and how long customs clearance takes.
Local delivery. "Arrival at delivery office", "out for delivery", "delivered", or the destination post's equivalents. If the parcel is marked delivered and you do not have it, use the checklist in package says delivered but not received.
How long is normal
China-side processing, collection to departure: two to seven days is common. The international leg, departure to arrival at the inward office: one to three weeks for economy air services, longer for sea and for remote destinations, and this is the stretch with no scans. Destination processing and delivery: a few days to a week. So a total of three to six weeks is ordinary for the cheapest services, and a parcel is not late until it has passed the seller's stated delivery window. Marketplace sellers on AliExpress, Temu and Shein often use China Post or a consolidator that hands off to it, and those marketplaces' own status wording is explained in AliExpress tracking statuses, Temu tracking statuses and Cainiao tracking statuses.
The merchant view: postal vocabulary is a support ticket generator
A cross-border seller using China Post sees the same three questions on repeat: what does "opening" mean, why has it said "departure" for two weeks, and is it lost. Each is a ticket that a plain-language tracking page would have prevented. The operational fix is to translate postal scans into milestones the customer understands ("cleared for export, in transit to your country, next update on arrival, estimated 10 to 20 days") and to trigger the reassurance message on the departure scan rather than waiting for the customer to write in.
Pango normalises China Post and 100+ other carriers into one milestone set, sends the "expect a quiet stretch" message automatically, and raises an exception only when the arrival scan is genuinely overdue for the lane. The cost of not doing it is spelled out in what is WISMO.
The bottom line
China Post's statuses are postal, not courier, language: collection, opening, dispatching and departure are the China side, arrival at the inward office is the handover to your own post, and the silence between them is the international leg working as designed. For merchants, translating those scans and messaging the quiet stretch proactively is the difference between a tracking page and a ticket queue. See the post-purchase operations platform and book a demo.
