Vietnamese agarwood grading: kỳ nam, trầm and tốc

Vietnam's grading vocabulary builds on the kỳ nam and trầm hương split covered in Vietnamese agarwood, but that is only the first layer. Within kỳ nam, traders recognise colour grades, and below kỳ nam sits a long list of trade names for ordinary agarwood and lower-resin wood. Much of this vocabulary comes from traders and local press rather than any official scale, so it is best read as trade usage.

Kỳ nam, trầm and tốc

Vietnamese sources commonly describe three broad classes. Kỳ nam is the rarest and most valuable, soft and unusually oil-rich, and treated as a category apart from ordinary agarwood rather than simply its highest grade. Trầm, or trầm hương, is ordinary resinous agarwood. Tốc is wood with much less resin, used for lower grade incense and similar products. One Vietnamese article describes kỳ nam as often having oil content above 20 percent and tốc below 2 percent, though these figures are not drawn from a published standard.

The colours of kỳ nam

Kỳ nam is traditionally divided by colour. The four names that appear most often are bạch kỳ nam (white), thanh kỳ nam (green or blue-green), huỳnh kỳ nam (yellow) and hắc kỳ nam (black). In descriptions from Khánh Hòa traders, white kỳ nam is ivory-coloured, soft and very oily, and described as almost gone from the market; green kỳ nam is glossy blue-green, soft when oily; black kỳ nam is glossy black; and yellow kỳ nam is the colour of beeswax, hard and heavy when fresh and lighter as it dries.

White is widely regarded as the rarest, with green second. Beyond that, sources disagree. A Khánh Hòa trader quoted by VietnamNet gave the saying "nhất bạch, nhì thanh, tam hắc, tứ huỳnh": first white, second green, third black, fourth yellow, followed by a fifth type, kỳ hổ. Other trade descriptions give a different order for the lower grades. The same article reported white kỳ nam at around 50 billion đồng per kilogram and green at around 10 billion, figures that illustrate the scale of the premium rather than a market price you could expect to pay.

Trầm and tốc trade names

Below kỳ nam, the vocabulary multiplies. Vietnamese press reports name trầm grades such as trầm kiến xanh, trầm mắt tử and trầm hột mít, and distinguish trầm that forms near the bark from trầm that forms in the core. The tốc class has its own long list, including tốc bông, tốc đá, tốc ớt, tốc kiến, tốc nước, tốc lọ and tốc gỗ. Many of these names describe how the resin formed or what the wood looks like, and the same name can be applied differently by different traders.

No single official scale

We could not find a Vietnamese national standard (TCVN) that sets out how agarwood should be graded, and the terms above are applied by traders rather than defined in law. In practice, Vietnamese evaluation draws on the same criteria used elsewhere: resin, density and whether wood sinks, colour, scent when heated, and the seller's account of origin and formation. That makes a Vietnamese grade name meaningful information, but not a measurement.

Reading a Vietnamese grade claim

Kỳ nam in particular attracts misrepresentation, because the price gap between kỳ nam and good trầm is so large. When a seller uses a Vietnamese grade name, ask what it means to them, how they would describe the piece in terms of resin, density and scent, and whether the wood is wild or plantation grown. Treat any kỳ nam claim, and especially white or green kỳ nam, with the scrutiny described in fake oud: what to look for, and run the checks in how to test agarwood at home.