Look at how a Korean restaurant lists itself and the last line is not the address. It is a station and a number.
That number is doing more work than it looks. At a large station the exits are far enough apart that choosing wrongly means surfacing into the correct neighbourhood and the wrong block, sometimes on the far side of a road you cannot cross.
The station is not the destination
Gangnam station has twelve exits. Eight belong to Seoul Metro and four to the Shinbundang Line, and they are spread around a junction on one of the widest roads in the city.
Arriving at Gangnam tells you roughly where you are in the way that arriving in Soho or Shinjuku does. It does not tell you which corner. The exit number is the part that does, which is why it is attached to almost every address a Korean will send you.
The numbers go round in a circle
Here is the thing that makes them usable rather than arbitrary.
Exit numbers run clockwise around the station. Whatever is numbered 1, the next number is the next exit round, and so on until the circle closes. So the numbers carry adjacency: 4 and 5 are neighbours, 4 and 11 are most of a lap apart.
That has a consequence people learn the hard way. Since the sequence goes all the way round, at some point it crosses the main road. One run of numbers is on one side and another run is on the other. Surface at the wrong one and the crossing you need may be the station you have just walked out of.
Which is the whole argument for reading the sign on the platform before you climb the stairs. The signage lists what each exit serves, and it is the last moment the decision is free.
The numbers are not permanent
In 2011 the Shinbundang Line arrived at Gangnam, four new exits were added, and the existing ones were pushed along to make room. Exits 3 to 8 became 7 to 12.
The casualty was exit 6. It had been the meeting point, the one you named without thinking, and it became exit 10. Newspapers at the time carried the obvious complaint: how is anyone supposed to find the place in front of exit 6 now.
So a guide that tells you to meet at a specific numbered exit can be quietly wrong, and there is no way to tell by looking. Check a live map. This is not a system where old information degrades gracefully.
Somebody has already mapped this
If it seems odd that a number on a wall matters this much, consider that the government keeps a register of it.
Korea National Railway publishes a public dataset of the major facilities at each Seoul Metro exit, exit by exit: government offices, schools, hospitals, parks and the rest, with addresses. It runs to 10,650 rows, was last updated in November 2025, and carries no usage restrictions. The exit-level detail in map apps traces back to records like this one.
Ten thousand rows to describe which building is near which staircase is a reasonable description of how seriously the question is taken.
Using it
When someone sends you a place, look for the exit number and treat it as the last line of the address, because that is what it is. If it is missing, ask.
Check the exit on a map app before you travel rather than after you surface. Both Naver Map and Kakao Map name the exit on a place page, and the number is the bit to write down.
And if you need a lift rather than stairs, the exit matters more again, because step-free access runs through particular exits rather than all of them. The step-free guide covers which stations are covered and which are not.
One last thing, which connects to how addresses work here. The road-name address is what goes on a parcel. The exit number is what goes in a message to a friend. Koreans will almost always send you the second one, and now you know it is the more precise of the two.
The Gangnam renumbering, including exits 3 to 8 becoming 7 to 12 and the loss of exit 6 as a meeting point, is from Korean press coverage dated 25 July 2011 when the Shinbundang Line opening was announced; the station’s present count of twelve exits, split between two operators, is consistent with that renumbering. The exit dataset is Korea National Railway’s “major facilities by exit” release for Seoul Metro, 10,650 rows, last modified 26 November 2025 and published with no usage restrictions, checked on 14 September 2026. The clockwise ordering is described consistently in Korean explanations of the numbering system; the position of exit 1 varies by line, and I did not find an official publication stating the rule, so treat the clockwise order as the dependable part and the starting point as trivia. Any station map settles both in a few seconds.
