Imagine an Olympic Games Opening Ceremony; full of spectacle and colour, involving tens of thousands of performers. Add a good dollop of political propaganda and unashamed messaging. Throw in hundreds of well-drilled cute children, all eager to please. Imagine too that this ceremony takes place every single night for several months. Now you have just a small idea of the scale of the North Korean phenomenon known colloquially as the Mass Games.
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We visited many strange and wonderful places on our tour of North Korea. But this is a short story about a place we didn’t visit. The Hungnam fertiliser factory was first established in Hungnam by the Japanese in 1927 and reopened by the Koreans after having been destroyed in the Korean War.
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Nearly all the great buildings and monuments of Pyongyang were built to mark a significant event linked to the Great Leaders, usually a birthday; and Kim Il Sung was especially fortunate on his 70th to be honoured with three such gifts. This special event was marked with a grand library, a triumphal arch and a tower.
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The capital of the DPRK, Pyongyang, has been developed as a showpiece for the country, demonstrating to both outsiders and the North Korean people the strength and power of the regime, and making a strong statement about the country’s ambitions to be self-reliant in the face of often hostile challenges from elsewhere – those challenges being of course both political and at times physical.
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Kaesong is unusual among North Korean cities in having not been largely destroyed during the Korean War. It is also noteworthy as the only city to have changed hands as a result of the armistice agreement, having been part of South Korea from 1945 to 1950 until the 1953 Korean Armistice Agreement brought it under North Korean control.
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Once upon a time a king consulted geomancers to find the best place to locate the tomb of his beloved wife. The first one he asked recommended a place that, when he went to inspect it, seemed to him very inappropriate. So when he went to look at the suggestion of the second geomancer he was wary. He told officers in his revenue that he would climb the mountain alone to check it out. If they saw him wave his white handkerchief it would mean that he was displeased with the proposed site, and they should immediately kill the geomancer.
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Like many such states, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea does public art on a big scale. The many statues of the Dear Leaders are well known, but perhaps a little less so is this rather astounding example, the Monument to the Three Charters for National Reunification.
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Any visitor to North Korea can’t fail to be struck by the absence of what we take for granted both at home and in most countries we visit: advertising. Only state-produced goods are available, so with no competition for customers, there is no need to advertise. But that doesn’t mean that there no eye-catching posters clamouring for our attention in the streets.
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A highlight of any visit to North Korea’s capital is a ride on their metro. This is one of the deepest subway systems in the world (our guide said the deepest) at over 110 metres below ground level, and is designed to double as a citywide bomb shelter, with blast doors at the foot of each lengthy escalator.
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One person I did not expect to meet in North Korea was a monk. In this famously atheist country, where tourists are forbidden to disseminate religious texts and the prevailing religion might be said to be belief in the supremacy of the Dear Leaders and the Juche idea, true religious conviction is hard to find. And I am still unsure whether or not I found it here.
