Gold Weight Units Around the World — Tola, Baht, Tael, Luong and More

The troy ounce is the international trading unit, but almost nobody buys jewellery in troy ounces. Every major gold market has its own traditional weight, and comparing prices across markets means converting between them correctly.

Here is what each one actually is.

The international units

Troy ounce — 31.1034768 g. The unit gold is quoted in globally. Note it is *not* the ordinary avoirdupois ounce of 28.35 g used for groceries — confusing the two produces a 9% error.

Gram — 1 g. How jewellery is weighed almost everywhere, even where prices are quoted in something else.

Kilogram — 1000 g. Bar trade and wholesale.

South Asia

Tola — 11.6638038 g. Pakistan, India and Nepal. Defined as exactly three-eighths of a troy ounce, which is why the decimal is so precise. Subdivides into 12 masha, and each masha into 8 ratti.

Vori / bhori — 11.6638038 g. Bangladesh. Identical to the tola, subdivided instead into 16 ana of 0.729 g each.

Pavan / sovereign — 8 g. Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Sri Lanka. A genuinely different weight from the tola, so a "per pavan" price and a "per tola" price are not comparable at a glance.

Masha — 0.97198365 g. One-twelfth of a tola, still used for small pieces in Pakistan.

Ratti — 0.121497956 g. One-eighth of a masha. Now mostly a gemstone unit.

Southeast Asia

Baht — 15.244 g. Thailand. The bullion baht is 15.244 g; Thai gold jewellery is conventionally sold at 96.5% purity, and jewellery weights are sometimes quoted against a slightly different figure of about 15.16 g. When comparing Thai prices, check which convention is in use.

Chi — 3.75 g and luong (also cay or tael) — 37.5 g. Vietnam. Ten chi make one luong. Vietnamese gold is typically sold at very high purity.

Tael — 37.7994 g. Hong Kong. Note this is *not* the same as the Vietnamese luong of 37.5 g despite both sometimes being called a tael. Taiwan uses yet another value, 37.5 g. This is the most error-prone unit in the list.

East Asia

Momme — 3.75 g. Japan. Also used in pearl weighing.

Don — 3.75 g. Korea. Same weight as the momme and the Vietnamese chi.

Western markets

Pennyweight (dwt) — 1.55517384 g. One-twentieth of a troy ounce. Used by scrap gold buyers in the United States, and worth watching: a price quoted per pennyweight looks much smaller than the same price per gram, because a pennyweight is larger than a gram. Buyers quoting in dwt are not doing anything wrong, but the unit is unfamiliar enough that it is easy to misread.

Grain — 0.06479891 g. Largely historical for gold, still used in some specialist contexts.

The comparison problem

The practical consequence: a rate quoted per tola in Karachi, per baht in Bangkok and per gram in Dubai cannot be compared without conversion, and small errors in the conversion factor mask real differences in premium.

Two rules make it manageable:

Convert everything to grams first. Every unit above has an exact gram value. Reduce both prices to a per-gram basis and the comparison becomes trivial.

Normalise the karat too. A 22K per-gram price and a 24K per-gram price differ by 8.3% purely on purity. Comparing them directly is a mistake people make constantly.

Full reference

Our unit converter converts between all of these with the live gold value of each attached, so you can compare markets directly rather than doing the arithmetic by hand.