hjm1980/korea-places-multilingual

Korean Place Names, Multilingual

Built and maintained by [Korea Basics](https://basics.aljal.kr), a sourced guide to Korean entry rules and getting around, published in seven languages.

16,126 places in South Korea with their Korean (Hangul) name next to the romanized English name, plus Japanese and Chinese names where the source has them, coordinates, road-name address, and subway lines for stations.

Why this exists

A visitor who reads "Gyeongbokgung Palace" in a guide cannot type that into KakaoMap or Naver Map, which is what actually works for navigation and taxis in Korea. They need 경복궁. Going the other way, a Korean name in a news article or a signboard photo is hard to match against an English itinerary.

That mapping is not published anywhere as a plain table. This is that table.

See it in use

The map at https://basics.aljal.kr/map/ runs on this data. Search an English name, get the Hangul back, and hand it straight to KakaoMap, Naver Map or a taxi driver. The same site publishes Korean entry rules with a source link and a checked-on date against every value, which is where this table comes from in the first place.

Coverage

Regions: busan, chungbuk, chungnam, daegu, daejeon, gangwon, gwangju, gyeongbuk, gyeonggi, gyeongnam, incheon, jeju, jeonbuk, jeonnam, sejong, seoul, ulsan (our own slugs, e.g. seoul, gyeonggi, busan). Categories: attraction, course, culture, event, food, hub, nightview, shopping, station, stay.

Columns

• —id - stable identifier. For TourAPI rows this is the Korea Tourism Organization contentId.
• —name_ko - Korean name. This is the column the dataset exists for.
• —name_en / name_ja / name_zh_hant / name_zh_hans - names as published by the source in that language.
• —name_ru / name_th - Russian and Thai names. The upstream API has no service in these languages, so these are ours (see ours).
• —lat / lng - WGS84.
• —region, category - our classification.
• —address_en - romanized road-name address, where the source provides one.
• —subway_lines - semicolon separated, stations only.
• —homepage - official page, where the source provides one.
• —source - where the row came from (see below).
• —ours - which name columns we authored rather than received, semicolon separated. Empty for most rows.

Sources and licensing

Rows carry different upstream terms. The source column tells you which.

Every name marked in ours is our own translation work, as is the compiled table itself. Keep the upstream attributions above intact alongside ours.

How to cite

CC BY 4.0 asks for attribution. Copy one of these.

Korean Place Names, Multilingual. Korea Basics, 2026.
https://basics.aljal.kr - CC BY 4.0.
Derived from Korea Tourism Organization, Korea National Railway
and Seoul Metropolitan Government open data.

@misc{koreabasics_places_2026,
  title        = {Korean Place Names, Multilingual},
  author       = {Korea Basics},
  year         = {2026},
  howpublished = {https://huggingface.co/datasets/hjm1980/korea-places-multilingual},
  url          = {https://basics.aljal.kr},
  note         = {CC BY 4.0. Derived from Korea Tourism Organization TourAPI,
                  Korea National Railway and Seoul Metropolitan Government open data}
}

What this is not

• —Not a rules or regulations dataset. Entry requirements, customs allowances and visa rules live on the site with per-value sources and a checked-on date, and are deliberately not published as bulk data: a copy stripped of its date is worse than no copy.
• —Not exhaustive. It is what the upstream ledgers contain as of the sync date, not every place in Korea.
• —Not verified place-by-place by us. Names come from the upstream sources. We did not walk them.

Ledgers synced 2026-08-12. Questions, corrections and wrong names: contact@aljal.kr, or the Community tab here. Corrections get folded back into the site as well, since the same table draws the map.