My wife and I completed our marriage registration in Nanjing at the "Jiangsu Registration Service Centre for Foreign-related Marriage" this weekend.
The documents I needed:
Passport with Residence Permit.
Certificate of Marriageability from the US Embassy.
The documents my wife needed:
Hukou
ID Card
The process took about an hour. The costs:
9 RMB: Registration fee
100 RMB: Translation fee for my "Certificate of Marriageability" from the US Embassy.
30 RMB (x 2): Registration photos. We had read online that the office would reject all pre-printed photos as being the "wrong size", forcing you to get them reprinted there. So, we had our wedding photo professionally done and took a .jpg version of it on a thumb drive to the office. We needed a total of six of the little photos; three for the registration booklets and three for the notarized, translated registration certificates. The office had a camera rig to take photos for those people who hadn't planned ahead.
100 RMB (x3): Notarization of three copies of our wedding registration certificate.
100 RMB: Translation of our wedding registration certificate.
120 RMB: Other fees, mostly for EMS delivery of our documents, I think, but there may have been some other admin fees in there, too.
Total cost: 789 RMB. No debit/credit cards accepted, so be sure to take a wad of cash.
I think that we could have gotten out the door for around RMB200 had we not gotten the translated & notarized copies of our certificate, but I thought it better to get the copies now rather than waiting until whenever we beging to apply for my wife's green card.
The wedding registration bureau gives you the soft sell on a number of upsells throughout the process…fake gold coins with the year on them, display boxes for your registration books, photos of the ceremony, etc. We paid for two photos of the little ceremony (an astounding 30RMB each), but that was it…the other stuff seemed to be of pretty shoddy quality.