An E100 Toyota Corolla sedan with diplomatic license plates, seen on a small car repair market in north Beijing in 2015. The good Toyota was in a pretty bad shape and appeared to be abandoned.
Like in most countries, cars used by foreign embassies have special license plates in China. In the capital Beijing, diplomatic license plates start with the character 使 (shi), short for 大使馆 dashiguan, and that means embassy. The character 使 is normally red but the paint has almost completely faded away here.
Each embassy has its own 3-digit number. In this case the number is 118, which is Bulgaria. The next 3 digits are the car number. The ambassador’s official car is always 001 but there are no specific rules for the other numbers, and plates may be carried over from car to car. Our Corolla has car number 012, which means that the license plate, when it was issued, was used by the 12th car used by the Bulgarian embassy.
The seventh generation (E100) Toyota Corolla was made from 1991 until 1998. Like it was common back then, design and specs of the Corolla differed considerably depending on market. This one looks very much like the North American spec E100 Corolla we saw earlier, but details like the rear lights differ. It looks mostly like the South East Asian-spec E100, like it was sold in countries like Thailand and the Philippines.
Note the strange beast sitting on the edge of the trunk.
In Asia, the E100 Toyota Corolla XL model was powered by a 1.3 liter four-cylinder petrol engine with an output of 88 hp and 98 Nm. Gearbox was a 5-speed manual, sending horses to the front wheels.
The E100 Corolla was not sold in China. How exactly a Asian-spec Toyota ended up at the Bulgarian embassy is not entirely clear but there are several possibilities. One is that a Bulgarian diplomat simply bought is from a diplomat working for an embassy of a South East Asian country, and another is that a Bulgarian diplomat brought the car to China from an earlier posting in a South East Asian country. We will probably never know but it is in any way great to see a for-China rare Toyota in Beijing.