Where Korea's most-read stars were born: 50 of 123 in Seoul, but not one BTS member

Every city, and everyone born there

Order is by how many stars, then by their combined reads. Reads are per million reads of each of the four Southeast Asian Wikipedias, so the size of each edition is already divided out.

The 50 born in Seoul, most read first

The ones we did not put in a city — and why

These 26 are not missing from the count above by accident. Each is here for a stated reason.

Wikidata records a country, not a city (9)

Byeon Woo-seok (South Korea) · Kim Seon-ho (South Korea) · Lee Chae-min (South Korea) · Lim Ji-yeon (South Korea) · Choi Hyun-wook (South Korea) · Kim Da-mi (South Korea) · Kim So-hyun (Australia) · Choo Young-woo (South Korea) · Lee Sun-kyun (South Korea)

Byeon Woo-seok and Kim Seon-ho are among the most-read names in the whole panel, and we still cannot place them. Putting them in Seoul because that is the likeliest answer would be a guess, and a guess in a table reads exactly like a measurement.

North of the box we test against (1)

Lee Soon-jae (Hoeryong)

⚠ Our box reaches 39 degrees north, so most of North Korea falls outside it. Lee Soon-jae was born in Hoeryong. He was not born abroad — our ruler stops short of where he was born, and saying "outside Korea" would be wrong.

Born elsewhere (7)

Mark Lee (Toronto) · Moon Ga-young (Karlsruhe) · Jay Park (Seattle) · DPR Ian (Sydney) · Lomon (Tashkent) · Felix Lee (Sydney) · Jessica Jung (San Francisco)

No place of birth recorded (9)

Peanut · Lee Min-hyung · Kim Soo-hwan · Ryu Min-seok · Heo Nam-jun · Sooyoung · Choi Woo-je · Oner · Park Do-hyeon

What this page cannot tell you

P19 records where a person was born, which is not the same as where they are from. A hospital city is often recorded instead of the town a person grew up in. This page says "born in" and never "hometown".

The box we test against reaches 39.0 degrees north, so most of North Korea falls outside it. Lee Soon-jae was born in Hoeryong, which is north of the box and not abroad. We count those separately rather than calling them foreign.

A place with no coordinates in Wikidata is counted as unmeasured, not as outside Korea. Filling those in would change the counts.

Reads are lookups on four Southeast Asian Wikipedias. They measure curiosity in that region, not fame in Korea, and not visits to any place.

We test whether a birthplace is in Korea with its coordinates (P625), not with its country field (P17). P17 records involvement as well as location — that is how a battle in Vietnam once entered our list of Korean places.

Source — Wikidata (place of birth P19, coordinates P625, instance of P31) and Wikimedia Pageviews. Window — reads: August 2025 to July 2026, human traffic only, per million reads of each edition. Panel — the 149 most-read individual Korean names of 3204 we hold; groups are excluded because a group has no place of birth. Related: every country has its own star · who reads least.