DPRK Travellogue: Day Four

The following day we went to Kumsusan memorial palace; this was the primary residence of the eternal president Kim Il Sung (he had many other secret retreats but this was his official state residence). It is a vast building, of which were only allowed to see small parts, foreigners are apparently not worthy to see his office and bed chambers. It allegedly cost $750 million to convert it from a residence to a pilgrimage site after the death of the great leader in 1994; this was the time of the great famine, when people were starving across the country. The parts of the palace we are allowed to see were the room of lamentation which is the room where every North Korean listens to the MP3 player provided that tells them about the death of the great leader. The other room to see takes the perversion grand prize for the country, Kim Il Sung’s embalmed corpse is on display, and as you pass through you must bow 3 times, at both his sides and at his head.

The final day in the country became the honoured dead grand tour in the morning. The next stop was the revolutionary martyr’s cemetery; this has over 500 grave stones for many obscure guerrilla comrades of Kim Il Sung, as well as the most honoured graves for his first wife (Kim Jong-suk) and favourite fellow fighter (O Chin-u). The cemetery is really just an obligatory ideological stop for all visitors to Pyongyang; it holds no particular interest to most, except to the relations of the dead buried there, and to regime true-believers. I did manage to make it interesting for myself though, by meeting more students from Kim Il Sung University, and talking to them in bad, broken Korean.

Tourism is a foreign currency earner, this is its role for the North Korean government, and they are not subtle in trying to liberate every last penny from your capitalist wallet. We went to 8 gift shops at least in the space of 4 days, perhaps more, I wasn’t really keeping count. The gift shop we went to on our last day was quite interesting however, because it wasn’t just for tourists, it was a functional shop open for domestic consumers. Most gift shops in Pyongyang are only opened when a tourist or visiting delegation is coming; they are left shut the rest of the time as they serve no other purpose. This means that the staff probably only serve customers 2-3 hours a week, 7 months of the year during the tourist season, at a maximum. The exception to the rule would be the shops at the Yanggakdo, which must be open most of daytime, whenever the hotel is open, as the hotel will always have a small number of guests, business or humanitarian as well as the seasonal tourists. But this gift shop was different; the ground floor had imported goods, dresses from China, motorbikes and watches from Japan to name a few. I even saw a copy of Rodong Shinmun (Workers News), the party newspaper, on the counter; the shop attendant wouldn’t let me buy it though. All the prices were in Euros, this is now the standard foreign currency in Pyongyang, and so this shop was clearly for the elite who can afford to spend hard currency on luxury goods. Most people even in Pyongyang who have hard currency, spend the bulk of it on food, to supplement very austere rations that are apportioned them by the state. Outside the capital, North Koreans often do not have access to state rations, or hard currency, so they have to barter or use the local North Korean currency, the Won. The quality of the goods on offer was poor, they did not look new, the watches were fake, the clothes looked akin to Primark knock-offs of named brands, and the motorbikes looked old, early 90s or late 80s in style. But this is to be expected, in a country almost untouched by globalisation and the influx of western goods that third world elites usually have access to as a result.

Mansudae is a very famous sight in the DPRK; if you have ever seen the giant statue of Kim Il Sung, hand outstretched toward the sky then you have seen Mansudae (Mansu Hill). It is another obligatory ideological stop, you are supposed to lay flowers at the feet of the statue, and bow before it to show even more respect to the peerless Patriot Kim Il Sung. It wasn’t worth the trip, the Supreme People’s Assembly the North Korean parliament, was just down the road from there, and it would have been much more interesting to see that. The statue is flanked by two sets of sculptures depicting Korean revolutionaries before and after the war, the constant theme of a united people of Peasants, workers and intellectuals is repeated.

The Pyongyang subway was opened in 1973, I have heard many journalists and commentators compare it to the Moscow metro. I have never been to Moscow so I cannot comment as to the veracity of these claims, but trusted sources tell me it was built with Russian expertise, architectural and engineering. It is the deepest subway system in the world and doubles as an air raid shelter, as you would imagine in the most militarised society on the planet. The platforms have luxuriant murals to the revolutionary exploits of Kim Il Sung, and the chandeliers befits a socialist paradise. The subway trains themselves are old East German (Correction: The Current rolling stock are West Berliner vintage from the 1980s) former communist rolling stock from the 1950s-80s. The doors don’t open automatically; you have to pull them with a handle! Inside the train there are very old fashioned hard, faux-leather seats and pictures of Kim father and son stare down from above the door to the next carriage. The Pyongyang subway is the showcase that isn’t, when compared to the Seoul subway. The Seoul subway is one the largest and most impressive subways in the world, ultra-modern and fully functional. Whilst the Pyongyang subway would have been impressive in the 1930s or 1940s, it looks extremely dated and quaint now.

When we exited the subway our driver was waiting to take us to the stamp shop, I managed to nab some shots of the Koryo Hotel before we got on the coach. I persuaded my guide to let me take my friend to the Koryo Hotel rather than go to the stamp shop directly (another gift shop to hoover up our hard currency). The Koryo Hotel was complete in 1985. It isn’t the first Koryo Hotel in Pyongyang, there was a Koryo Hotel in Pyongyang in 1945, this is where the old Nationalist leader in Pyongyang, Cho Man-sik (the so-called Korean Gandhi) was imprisoned after he disagreed with the Soviet Union over their plans for Korea (when they occupied the country in 1945). The new Koryo Hotel is the most luxurious hotel in Pyongyang; it has a vast, cavernous lobby, flanked by a tea house on one side and a bar on the other. The hotel is a favoured haunt of the North Korean Nomenklatura; I read a rumour in Bradley Martin’s book that Kim Jong-nam (first son of the dear leader) went on a shooting rampage there in the late 1990s and I really wanted see the place for myself. I didn’t see any bullet holes or signs of a massacre; I asked one frequent traveller to the DPRK and he dismissed the rumour as idle gossip. I played the piano at the hotel and had a very overpriced cup of coffee for €3; but this was the best cup of coffee in the country, it came from a machine that had real coffee beans in it. You could tell this was an elite hang out by all the creepy bureaucrats in Mao suits and sunglasses sitting at tables. This seems to be the style of the Nomenklatura in Pyongyang, the baggy summer Mao suit that looks like pyjamas (see Kim Jong Il in one here: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/5/5e/Kim_Jong_il_2009_2.jpg), and the tinted sunglasses. They look like a cabal of gangsters as a result.

The Tower of the Juche Idea was built in 1982 to replace the industrial achievements exhibit on the same sight. This was to celebrate the 60th Birthday of the Great Leader Kim Il Sung. Juche as already mentioned is the ideology of North Korea; like many words in Korean it has more than one meaning, but in this context it is often translated as Self-reliance. What it means in practice is that the DPRK has attempted (disastrously) to achieve self-suffiency in agriculture, and to rely less on foreign technology in manufacturing. North Korea was always reliant on Soviet preferential prices for oil and other vital raw materials which amounted to Aid. The tower itself is like a bigger version of the Washington Monument with a giant red light bulb in the shape of a flame at its peak. They charge you €5 to ride the elevator to the top; it’s worth the money because you get a panoramic view of Pyongyang (except when it’s covered in Mist, like the day we were there). I met an American academic at the top who specialises in Chinese 20th Century History; he said that the place had a feeling similar to Beijing after the death of Mao. He elaborated, it felt like it was in a transition period, the prevalence of foreign currency and the existence of state sanctioned markets seemed to him like the green shoots of a Korean style “Socialism with Chinese Characteristics”. I disagreed with him; I see the reform process in North Korea as being dead locked in an institutional cul-de-sac. The military and the party hierarchy have much to gain by small reforms that can bring in foreign currency, like joint ventures with foreign companies (like the Kaesong industrial project). But they have everything to lose by embracing Chinese style reform; these reforms would necessarily lead to an influx of information about the outside world and would destroy the regime’s credibility. As so often noted by specialists in this field, Vietnam and China could risk capitalism because they did not have a large ethnically identical capitalist rival that would discredit the regime (Taiwan is far too small to discredit Beijing). The other major road block to reform is the continued profitability of the status quo, the Nomenklatura is Pyongyang have control over all the profitable industries that the state still runs; this means that they can still enjoy a comparatively comfortable standard of living. When East Europe liberalised in 1980s and 1990s, most of the Nomenklatura lost these kinds of privileges; even in China, former Nomenklatura status is no guarantee of a decent standard of living.

The second to last stop on the trip was the 50th Anniversary Monument to the Foundation of the Worker’s Party of Korea. It was completed in 1995; this isn’t actually the 50th Anniversary the WKP was founded in 1949, when the Southern and Northern parties were merged into one party. The 1945 date is the founding date of the Korean Communist Party, which was a fundamentally different organisation. Anyway, the monument is quite an iconic image for Pyongyang. It is a large stone building with a stone paint brush (symbolic of the intellectual), a stone sickle (the peasant), and a stone hammer (the worker). It is another example of terrible waste, completed at the start of the great famine.

My last evening in Pyongyang was very interesting; I went the far side of the island on which the Yanggakdo resides. There was an outdoor bar staffed by 20 year old bar staff, their English was about as basic as my Korean, but they were very interested to hear about South Korea. I did an impression of my South Korean friends talking on their mobiles in Korean which they found uproariously funny. One of the staff was a girl my age who was very cute for a North Korean, and she seemed very interested in me, so I bought her a drink and tried to talk to her in Korean and English. It was very difficult, but she wanted me to come back to Pyongyang to see her again; she was reading a Korean folk love story, and I wish I had met her sooner, then I could have taken her on more dates. I went back the following morning to tell her that I was leaving, and told her I would be coming back to Pyongyang to take her out on another date. She was about as forward as any girl in Pyongyang can be considering how conservative North Korea is, but I hope to continue my North Korean love life when I go back.

I owe a debt of thanks to the following scholars who have been so influential on my thoughts on North Korea: Andrei Lankov, Dae-sook Suh, Brian Reynolds Myers, Robert Scalapino, Chong-sik Lee, David Hawk, Charles Armstrong, Adrian Buzo, Erik Cornell, Ralph C. Hassig, Kongdan Oh, Bradley K. Martin, Bruce Cumings, Helen Louise Hunter, Marcus Noland, Stephen Haggard, Balazs Szalontai, and Hy-sang Lee.