BTS hometowns: Daegu, Busan, and not one 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.

Seven members, five cities, no Seoul

All seven members have a birthplace recorded, and not one of them was born in the capital. Five cities, none of them the capital.

So: which BTS member is from Busan? Jimin and Jungkook. From Daegu, Suga and V. The other three each came from a different city again. If that is the question you arrived with, the member-by-member page — where each BTS member was born — takes it one step further and shows what a recorded place of birth does and does not tell you about where somebody is from.

Correction, 2026-08-26. This section first said six members, four cities and left Jin out, with a note that we could not place him. That was wrong, and it was wrong in a way worth naming: we mixed two panels. Jin does not clear the reading threshold for the Southeast Asia panel further down this page — but he is in the birthplace table, Gwacheon, Wikidata Q24276424, checked again today. A person missing from one measurement is not missing from all of them. Adding him changes the count and not the finding: still no Seoul.

Six of the seven are read widely enough in Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand and Malaysia to enter that separate reading panel. Jin is not — a gap in what we measured of readership, not a gap in where he was born.

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.