V and Suga were born in Daegu, Jungkook and Jimin in Busan. Not one BTS member on our list is from Seoul

Seoul is where Go Youn-jung, Faker, IU, Jang Won-young, Lee Min-ho, Kim Woo-bin, T.O.P, Jun Ji-hyun, Park Bo-gum and Hyun Bin were born — and 40 more of the most-read Korean names in Southeast Asia. Fifty out of the 123 we could place on a map. 41% of them, from one city.

Then there is BTS.

Six members, four cities, no Seoul

Six of the seven members are read widely enough in Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand and Malaysia to enter our panel, and not one of them was born in the capital. Jin is not, so we cannot place him — that is a gap in what we measured, not a finding about him.

V is the most-read of the six by a distance: 233 reads per million against Jungkook’s 140 and Suga’s 72. Two of the group’s three most-read members come from Daegu, a city that supplies four stars in the whole panel.

What the rest of the map looks like

Thirty-seven cities in all. After Seoul the numbers fall away fast: the second city has 9 and the seventh has 4. Ulsan gave us Kim Tae-hee, Han So-hee, Jang Ki-Yong and Seo In-guk — four names from an industrial port, twice what Incheon produced in this panel despite Incheon being much the larger city. We are not going to explain that; four against two is a difference two coin flips could make.

Twenty-six people we refused to place

This is the part we would leave out if we were only trying to make a map look full.

Nine have a country recorded and no city. Byeon Woo-seok, Kim Seon-ho, Lee Chae-min, Lim Ji-yeon, Choi Hyun-wook, Kim Da-mi, Choo Young-woo and two more. Byeon Woo-seok and Kim Seon-ho are among the most-read names in the entire panel. Seoul is the likeliest answer for both. We are not writing it down, because a guess in a table looks exactly like a measurement.

Seven were born elsewhere. Mark Lee in Toronto, Moon Ga-young in Karlsruhe, Jay Park in Seattle, DPR Ian and Felix Lee in Sydney, Lomon in Tashkent, Jessica Jung in San Francisco.

One is north of the box we test against. Lee Soon-jae was born in Hoeryong. Our box stops at 39.0 degrees north, which is south of most of North Korea, so the coordinate check puts him outside it. He was not born abroad. Reporting him as “outside Korea” because our ruler is short would be a false statement about a living actor, so he gets his own line.

Nine have no place of birth recorded at all. Not zero — unrecorded.

Why we checked with coordinates and not with the country field

We have made this mistake before, in public. An earlier version of our Korean places list used Wikidata’s country field (P17), and the Battle of Khe Sanh — fought in Vietnam — came through as a Korean place, because P17 records involvement as well as location and South Korean forces were there. Our first check for that bug read the same field it was checking, and reported zero problems.

So this page decides Korea by coordinates. A star born in Seattle lands outside the box no matter what any country field says, and a city with no coordinates is counted as unmeasured rather than quietly dropped.

The full table — all 37 cities, every name in each, and the 26 we would not place — is at where Korea’s most-read stars were born.