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Which way is Seoul,
and where are you starting from?

Direction · September 2026 · 7 min read

Which way is Seoul from the city you live in?

If you live in Singapore, Seoul is north-northeast of you. From Kuala Lumpur it is north-northeast too, a few degrees further round. From Tokyo it is west-northwest, and from Beijing it is east-southeast. A bearing is not a label stuck to the destination — it is a relationship between two points.

Which is why the question "what direction is good for me this year" has a different answer for every reader. Same year, same Seoul, and yet for a reader in Taipei it is a conversation about north, and for a reader in Fukuoka it is a conversation about northwest. The reasoning lives in how to choose your travel direction. This piece is about the actual angles.

Why can't you just measure it with a ruler on a map?

Because the earth is curved. A straight line drawn on a flat map is not the shortest path across the surface, and the angle you read off it drifts from the real bearing. Bearings are measured as a great-circle azimuth: the direction you first turn to face when you stand at your origin and look toward your destination.

The further you go, the wider the gap. Every number below is a great-circle bearing toward Seoul (37.5665°N, 126.978°E), measured clockwise from north at 0°.

What is the bearing from Southeast Asia and the rest of Asia to Seoul?

Singapore and Kuala Lumpur sit at the far end of the list by distance, and both look toward Seoul on almost the same line.

Singapore is 4,672 km from Seoul and Fukuoka is 540 km, and yet both are ordinary flights within their own regions. What the table shows is that most of Asia looks north to reach Seoul — north through northeast from the tropics and the Chinese-speaking cities, west through northwest from Japan.

Taipei is the interesting case for readers in Singapore and Kuala Lumpur. All three sit in the same 16-point sector, NNE, and yet Taipei's 18.9° falls in the north half of that sector while Singapore's 27.8° falls in the northeast half. Same sector, different 8-point answer.

How do you convert a bearing into 8-point and 16-point directions?

You cut 360° into equal slices and centre each direction in its own slice. The 8-point compass uses 45° per slice, the 16-point compass 22.5°. North is centred on 0°, so 8-point north runs from 337.5° round to 22.5°.

The important detail is that one 16-point slice can straddle two 8-point ones. The samsal direction and the daejanggun direction are stated in 8-point terms, so this conversion is a step you cannot skip when you check a bearing against them.

What about cities that sit right on a boundary?

A degree or two either side of a boundary is not enough to overturn a reading. Taking both neighbouring characters into account is closer to how it actually works.

The table is full of these. Hong Kong at 33.0° and Macau at 34.0° are one degree apart and land in different 16-point slices. Shenzhen at 33.6° and Shanghai at 34.1° split over half a degree. Fukuoka at 326.0° sits a quarter of a degree short of the NW/NNW line.

Tokyo at 284.3° is a boundary of a different kind: west-northwest on the 16-point compass, but west once you drop to eight points. It stands at the western edge looking toward the northwest, so read west as the base and northwest as the grain running through it. Osaka, at 295.1°, is in the same 16-point slice but past 292.5°, which makes it northwest on eight points.

What if your bearing overlaps the 2027 samsal direction?

2027 is the year of Jeongmi (정미, 丁未). Mi belongs to the Hae-Myo-Mi group, which puts the samsalbang (삼살방, the samsal direction) in the west and the daejanggunbang (대장군방, the great-general direction) in the east. The detail is set out in samsalbang and daejanggunbang for 2027.

Lay that over the table. Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Hong Kong and Shanghai all look northeast, and Taipei looks north, so none of them overlaps either direction. Tokyo, Nagoya and Sapporo look west, which meets the samsal direction; Beijing and Xian look east, which meets the daejanggun direction.

If yours overlaps, the response is small and practical. Put fewer things in each day, leave more time between connections and transfers, and keep the day after you land back home free of anything that matters. A trip you come home from in a few days was never what these criteria were aimed at.

An overlap is not a sign to stay home. It is a sign to leave more room.

You can also balance it with the calendar. You cannot change the bearing, but you can change the departure date — good days to visit Korea in 2027 puts the son-eomneun-nal and the solar terms side by side.

So how do you actually use this?

Four steps and you are done.

• Settle your departure city firstEven inside one country the 8-point answer changes — Sapporo and Fukuoka do not match.
• Find the bearing in the tableIf your city is not listed, take the nearest large city as a working value.
• Convert to eight pointsThe yearly directions are stated in eight points, so this is where you line them up.
• Check it against the yearOverlap means more slack in the itinerary. No overlap means carry on.

If you also want the direction that movement runs easily in for your own zodiac animal, yeokma directions for 2027 covers all twelve. Choosing neighbourhoods once you are inside Seoul is a separate piece: Seoul neighbourhoods by element.

5htrip recalculates the bearings for your candidate destinations once you set a departure city, using a verified Manseryeok engine. Change the origin and the whole table is redrawn — that is simply what this calculation is.