Taiwanese catty (台斤) to kilograms

The formula

kilograms = 台斤 × 0.6

One 台斤 is exactly 600 grams. There is no rounding: the unit was fixed at 600 g when Taiwan standardised on the Japanese kin, and it has stayed there.

To go the other way, divide by 0.6 — or multiply by 1.6667. See kg to 台斤.

Three units called 斤, twenty per cent apart

This is the reason the conversion is worth a page. The same character means three different weights depending on where it is written:

“Three catties of pork” is 1800 g in Taipei and 1500 g in Shanghai. Online recipes, cross-border shopping and translated cookbooks are where this goes wrong, and it goes wrong by a fifth.

Hong Kong’s figure is the one in the Weights and Measures Ordinance — it descends from the old 司馬 standard rather than being rounded to a metric number. See catty to kg.

Quick reference

Taels, and 半斤八兩

A 台斤 is sixteen 兩, not ten, so one 台兩 is 37.5 g:

Sixteen to the catty is what makes the idiom 半斤八兩 — “half a catty, eight taels” — mean two things that are identical. In the mainland the same phrase survives while the arithmetic behind it does not: a 市斤 has been ten 兩 since 1959, so half of one is five.

The 錢 is still the working unit in Chinese medicine shops and in gold retail.

Where it is still used

Taiwanese packaged food is labelled in grams by law, but the traditional market is not packaged food. Produce, meat and fish are priced per 台斤 at wet markets, fruit stalls and Chinese medicine shops, and 台斤 is what a vendor means by 斤 without qualification.

A price of NT$120 per 台斤 is NT$200 per kilogram — worth doing before comparing a market price against a supermarket one.

Note that the price multiplies by 1.667 while the weight multiplies by 0.6 — they move in opposite directions, because a price is money per unit weight.

Estimating in your head

Take three fifths. Or halve it and add a tenth of the original: 5 台斤 halved is 2.5, plus 0.5 is 3 kg — exact, because the factor is exact.