I was the last of the tour group to board the train to Pyongyang at Sinuiju, and all the cabins were full, except for a cabin of mostly middle-aged Chinese men. Across from my seat was my Chinese roommate for the tour, a college student from Anhui. As I sat down, my fellow passengers were pointing at one of the guides, the fair lady in a yellow hanbok who never smiled. 朝鲜美女 (trans. Joseon beauty), they laughed, come and join us. If she had heard them, she pretended not to.

As the train rolled its way through North Pyong’an, I noticed ragged children sleeping in a shady spot by the train tracks. Even the cows in the fields looked skinny.

(Yanggakdo hotel lobby, Pyongyang) For a country that has officially banned hanja, I guess they know where the credit comes from…

One morning, while my roommate was in the shower, I turned on the television in our hotel room, reminded of Orwell’s telescreen. The morning news show I saw was just like the novel’s description of perpetual war news. Big, black bold comic-book-style headlines superimposed over scenes of crisis and famine. It was as if the world outside was all gloom and doom. We have always been at war with Eastasia.

As I waited in the hotel lobby for the tour group to gather from breakfast, I saw a group of catholic nuns in traditional habits. Among them was an old man in a grey robe with a long, white beard. For some reason, he reminded me of Uncle Ho.

(Kaesong city)

We stopped for lunch in Kaesong city on our way back to Pyongyang from the DMZ. It was a restaurant for tourists, and they had souvenirs and gifts for sale with prices listed in euros. I saw bottles of Ryongtongsul soju across the counter, and asked about them. 8 RMB each. I tried to buy more than two bottles, as gifts for my friends in Beijing, but they wouldn’t sell them to me. Some kind of socialist rationing system, perhaps.

The other tourists were attempting to bargain down the prices of some kind of medicinal herb tonic, which took a long while as our guides translated the back and forth of negotiations. So much for central planner set prices. I stepped outside for some air, onto the wide streets of Kaesong city. It was eerily quiet, without the typical hum of urban activity. As I looked up into the nearby apartments, trying to see how the inhabitants lived, I heard the soft tones of piano keys playing an unfamiliar melody, and wondered if there was Chopin here, or Rachmaninov.

On the remaining drive, the guides sang karaoke for us. We passed by an old woman, her back bent under a bundle of sticks. She looked like she had carried these loads of firewood for a lifetime.

(Pyongyang) They must subscribe to the broken window fallacy here. Except the windows don’t get replaced.

One of our early stops was at the ‘international friendship’ museum at Mohyangsan, where gifts to either elder or younger Kim from around the world were displayed, some of which were quite strange, like an alligator holding a serving tray (Nicaragua). Apart from the Soviet bloc countries, there were some unexpected names there: Billy Graham, various US-based groups I had never heard of before, like the ‘World Council of Democratic Youth’. Gifts from chaebols, and companies based in Japan, Taiwan, and Hong Kong.

At the start of the route was a board listing each country from which gifts had been sent, and how many gifts there were. What interested me the most were 2 gifts originating from Singapore, and although I kept my eyes peeled for them, I could only found one. It was from a ‘Sunko company’. Having seen a gift from Suharto, right next to another from Sukarno earlier, I wondered if the second gift had been from one of our heads of government. After all, they are not so dissimilar.

On our route, we crossed the paths of local tours several times, and they seemed just as curious about us as we were about them. They looked like ordinary people from the rural provinces, wearing plain grey or navy shirts adorned only by little red pins. Very few of the men were taller than I am, and I’m pretty small. Men and women alike had faces weathered and tanned, like they spent all their days toiling in the fields under the hot sun. Not at all like the tall, fair-skinned folk of soap operas.

Ginseng wine loosens lips that could sink ships.

Our, or rather my English-language guide, not being a Chinese speaker, could only talk to two of the tour participants. Myself, and roommate. Armed with my prepared list of ‘safe’ questions and conversation topics, I started with a question about the guide. (People usually love to talk about themselves) Did he have a wife or a girlfriend? He laughed and said that he did not. I then asked when men and women typically marry. Around 30 for men, 25 for women, which I suspected was an urban number. The age of consent is 18, though kids typically start dating secretly while in school at 14 or 15. I replied that it was about the same as Singapore. And then my Chinese roommate asked about whether a hypothetical foreigner (i.e. himself) could marry a local girl.

That was the point the cultural sensitivity alarm bells went off in my head, about the historical relationship between the Korean kingdoms and imperial China, modern issues of cross-border bride trafficking and stories of forced abortions of pregnant repatriates. I hadn’t read Brian Myers’ The Cleanest Race at the time, but I already had some idea about the xenophobic racial purity ideology. And here was a dude from a ‘lesser’ race, asking an elite university student thoroughly steeped in regime propaganda, about stealing away a pure Joseon maiden. This could not end well.

The guide’s eyebrows narrowed. His smile disappeared. No. It is not allowed. I quickly changed the subject to sports and movies. Apparently ‘Titanic’ is popular.

A brief aside: At Myers’ book talk at Columbia a few weeks ago, I asked how the racial purity ideology could be reconciled with an overwhelming economic reliance on China. His answer: It cannot, which is why that reliance is downplayed. I didn’t find this answer satisfactory – how effectively is it downplayed? What happens when it can’t?

(Juche tower, Pyongyang) Salarymen and OLs are Workers too!

We arrived at the Juche tower near sunset. In front of the statue of the worker, peasant, and ‘socialist intellectual’, hundreds of people marched in formation, raising metal rods in the air as they said 만세 (manse, equivalent to banzai 萬歳 or wansui 万岁). I use the term ‘march’ loosely, as they seemed less than enthusiastic about whatever it was they were supposed to be celebrating. Probably something related to Juche.

The only people that were really into it were the ones in front of the formations shouting into megaphones. The rest of them looked like regular people who, after a long day at work, had to spend their evenings on Workers Party duties. One of the tourists, a middle-aged teacher from Shanghai, walked up to the back of the line and joined in. She probably had more fun than any of the real participants. I would have joined in too, had I not been busy snapping pictures, until one of the megaphone-wielding comrade commissars spotted me and cried foul. Fortunately, the guides intervened, and I was spared and survived to write this diary entry.

(Juche tower, Pyongyang) Sunset of the Workers Party?

Previously on Pyongyang Diaries: The Guides

They were the first to greet us at Sinuiju. That is, after the KPA soldiers had inspected our documents, presented by the mainland tour guide. It was a printout of tour passengers, with our passport-size portrait photographs pasted on adjacent to our profiles. The border guard who came onto the Dandong-Sinuiju train cabin only asked for it after seeing my passport cover of a different shade of red, which after glancing through, was satisfied. I wondered if the reason for his increased vigilance was that mainland Chinese were considered less of a security risk, and that I would have normally required a more intensive background check.

(Pyongyang subway) Notice the red pins. I wonder what happens if you forget to put it on in the morning.

Because of this delay, I got off the train last of all, and on the other side of the platform waiting by the Sinuiju-Pyongyang cabin car were two figures, one lady in a yellow hanbok and a man in a white short-sleeved shirt and black trousers. As I approached, I noticed they wore the red great leader pins on their left breasts. They did not, however, wear smiles.

They were the two guides assigned to our tour group. One male, and one female, to better facilitate communication with the varying interests of the passengers. Both spoke Mandarin fluently. The lady interacted mostly with the female tourists, older middle-aged ladies, and so I had few chances to discover who she was. She was pretty in a conventional way, or at least she would have been if she had smiled more.

The male guide, however, I had much more opportunities to chat with. Especially after he escorted roommate and myself back after our attempted escape from Yanggakdo. Complimenting him on his native-level Mandarin, he explained that he had grown up and went to university in China, so I surmised that he was from a highly mobile urban upper class – not the refugees hiding in fear of deportation by the Chinese authorities (and subsequent imprisonment), but those officially sanctioned to live, work, and conduct trade for the state abroad in its most important neighbor.

And then there was someone else, another local guide attached to our tour group. An ‘English-speaker’. He did not speak Mandarin, and could not interact with any of the mainland tourists. Since there were no English-speakers in our group, other than myself and roommate, I can only surmise that he was there because of me, which was initially quite alarming. However, his English language abilities seemed somewhat limited, which I supposed was due to a lack of oral practice with a native speaking partner. Perhaps he was feigning, and listening intently to my every word, or perhaps not.

(Pyongyang) A soft-serve ice cream vendor. Too bad there was only one flavor.

In our first conversation, I discovered that he was about my age and had just graduated from Kim Il Sung University’s mathematics department before starting with the tour agency. I wondered what a member of the elite and a rising cadre in the Workers Party was doing here as my tour guide. Was I paranoid to assume that he was there as my personal minder? Was he just as suspicious of me as I was of him? He seemed like a nice guy. Treated me to an ice cream one time when I was bored to tears by the overpriced-souvenir-shopping component of the tour.

(Arirang Mass Games, Pyongyang) I wonder what was on her playlist. Maybe some Super Junior?

At the Mass Games, I sat pretty close to the guides up front since I wanted a good view of the show, and I noticed that one of the female guides (for the other tour group) was listening to a slim iPod Nano (probably bored since she’d seen the show before). Even I don’t have an iPod Nano! Being a tour guide could be pretty lucrative since it allows travel and regular access to foreigners, and the possibility of hard currency tips and gifts for barter, but I didn’t think it would be that lucrative. I guess even in an egalitarian society some are more equal than others.

Previously on Pyongyang Diaries: Escape from Yanggakdo!
Next time: The People

As the train rolled into the station, I looked out the window and saw the sign above the entrance: 평양 (Pyongyang). Finally – the capital of the hermit kingdom. KPA soldiers herded us out of the train onto the platform, and down through a dark tunnel underneath the tracks. There were no lights, and it was too dark to make out the red script on the walls, but I had some idea of what revolutionary things they said. Only a few hours earlier that day, I had been in a similar tunnel at Dandong station, except on the walls there were advertisements. I was disappointed, because I really wanted to see what advertising was like in the DPRK.

(Pyongyang station, across) Pyonghwa motors ad with four cars… spoilt for choice!

Right outside the train station was the first advertisement I saw in North Korea: a billboard for Pyonghwa motors, the DPRK joint venture with the unification church. It was also the only advertisement I saw; there were other Pyonghwa billboards scattered around the city, but no other company enjoyed this privilege. I suppose Pyonghwa would have cornered the DPRK auto market if not for all the imported Toyotas I saw, which may reflect the relative cost/value of its product lines.

(Pyongyang highway) Another Pyonghwa ad. This one is for the hwiparam (whistle) aka Fiat Siena. I never actually saw one on the road, though.

I didn’t have time to ask the local guides about it then, as they rushed us from the train station doors into the tour bus, as if to limit our exposure to the people outside (or perhaps their exposure to us). I snapped a brief shot of the ad for later perusal, when we were warned again not to take pictures unless expressly permitted to. Yeah, right. I put away my DSLR, which was perhaps too conspicuous, and switched to my teeny point-and-shoot, which is why many of the street pictures you will see here are somewhat blurry and poorly composed.

(Pyongyang street) Another propaganda mural about songun and juche. There were so many I was almost glad that my vocabulary was too limited to understand them.

As we drove through the city, it occurred to me that it was like I had stepped into a time warp to the fifties and sixties. Some of the vehicles on the street looked like they had been manufactured then. The buildings looked dull, their monochrome paint faded in patches. The only bright colors were the red banners and propaganda murals. I wanted to get off the bus right there to get a closer look at the shops and pedestrians, and perhaps also the jangmadang black markets, and hatched a plan to escape from the hotel as soon as the coast was clear.

(Pyongyang street) I was under the impression that all their school uniforms included red scarves. One kid is wearing his orange cap backwards, no doubt a dangerous nonconformist.

Unfortunately, our tour group was to be accommodated at hotel Yanggakdo. Not Ryugyong hotel. Not Koryo hotel. But Yanggakdo hotel, on Yanggak island. It had not occurred to me that I would be stuck on an island in the middle of the Taedong river, and I despaired, seeing the many checkpoints and lack of cover. Unfortunately, my only stealth training was from playing Metal Gear Solid and watching Bond movies. Which is to say, none.

(Yanggakdo hotel) I guess one way to isolate the foreigners is to put them on an island.

We arrived at the hotel and were given our room assignments when I noticed a large delegation of tourists from the ROK in the lobby – I could tell because they wore special passes on lanyards. A few of them were priests and nuns, which I thought was interesting. The mainland tourists went off to enjoy the entertainments offered in the hotel. I dropped off my stuff in the room, and against my better judgment, told my roommate that I was going out to walk around. He insisted on coming along. I guess I felt better that at least I wouldn’t be alone if I were arrested for ‘hostile acts’ like seditious foreign journalizing.

(Yanggak Island, Pyongyang) The view from the 46th floor of Hotel Yanggakdo. Note the checkpoint on the bottom right.

It was a bad idea to bring him along. We got past the empty parking lot and golf course and took a short detour towards the spiral-shaped building, which was the ‘international cinema house’. And then we saw a group of locals playing volleyball. This kid just didn’t have any discretion – instead of avoiding them by going around, he went right up to announce our presence and tried to chat up the ladies with his phrasebook Korean. (more about his antics later) They looked half confused, half afraid. The entire group stopped playing and stared at us. Soon after, our tour guide came running up from the hotel and told us that we were not allowed to wander unsupervised. Someone must have sounded the alarm that foreigners were on the loose.

(Pyongyang international cinema house) Doesn’t look like its operating… maybe it only opens during the Pyongyang film festival.

In retrospect I probably wouldn’t have gotten much farther on my own either. First mistake: daylight (I thought I wouldn’t get good photographs otherwise) Second mistake: appearance. While my ‘southern province’ complexion wouldn’t necessarily give me away from a distance, I hadn’t been dressed and groomed conservatively to blend into the populace – I didn’t see a single local rocking a t-shirt, jeans, sneakers and a messy college hairstyle. Also, my DSLR was a dead giveaway. If I had looked the part, brought the point-and-shoot, and snuck out after dark, it might have worked, as it did for Jerry Guo – but the game was up for me.

(Pyongyang TV) I haven’t seen this kind of test signal since the early 90s.

We were taken back to the hotel, and since I have no interest in casinos, bars and the other ‘entertainments’, I ended up watching k-dramas like I always do (DPRK-dramas, that is). The one I saw that night was set in the colonial era. While I couldn’t understand most of the dialogue, it was pretty easy to tell what was going on: Japanese girl is in love with Korean guy, Japanese dude who is into the girl gets jealous, Korean guy prevails. Gee, I didn’t see that one coming. I think I’ll stick with F4, thanks.

(Pyongyang apartment building) All the buildings were grey and dull… the only bright colors are on the banners and murals.

I wondered that evening why I came on this tour if I wasn’t going to see economic reform and real, grassroots market development. Without seeing the jangmadang, everything else would be reading between the lines, seeing between the road stops of regime propaganda at the pain and suffering beneath. And I wasn’t here to see pain and suffering. I don’t want to have anything to do with poverty porn. And unlike the MDV tourism, the profits of the Communism zoo only go to the development of a privileged few.

I remember the older mainland tourists exclaiming to me how the countryside and the cityscape reminded them of the China of their youth, like we had stepped into a time machine back to the Cultural Revolution. The tone they had was a kind of sad sympathy mixed with a sense of schadenfreud relief. They could’ve gone anywhere else for a holiday but chose to come here. Why?

(Mangyondae, Pyongyang) The kids on their school trip seem as disinterested as we are to visit the great leader’s birthplace.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think that the tour operators to the developing world, or to here, don’t contribute something positive – they do, and I hope they prosper and flourish to the point where they become obsolete, and tourists will come to the DPRK for different reasons altogether (like maybe historical/cultural/eco-tourism or whatever). But to reach that point, we should be aware of the unspoken premise of the tour as it is now: to see an impoverished people living in fear and isolation. To be fair, awareness-raising on both sides, learning more about what’s going on, being part of the solution, are also part of it. I wonder how much we can really learn though.

Previously on Pyongyang Diaries: The Tourists
Next time: The Guides

I heard them chattering away even while getting through security screening at the Dandong station entrance. Thirty to forty (2 busloads worth) of middle-aged mainland Chinese people old enough to be my parents were clustered on hard plastic seats around the tour operator’s flag. I was the only ‘foreigner’, but thankfully I don’t look too different. Just younger. Hopefully if I kept my mouth shut, my crummy Mandarin and accent wouldn’t betray me.

One teacher from Shanghai, upon learning about my age, asked to introduce me to her daughter if I’m ever in town. She and her colleagues are on a group tour, and there are other groups of colleagues from other firms here too. They seemed like fairly middle-class people from the eastern provinces, affluent enough to go on a tour of ‘mysterious North Korea’ (that was how the tour was advertised), but perhaps not wealthy enough to go somewhere else, like Seoul. I wonder if they are spies collecting intelligence.

(Somewhere along the Pyongui line) Theme tourism idea: Considering how ancient the rolling stock looks, the DPRK might make a good retro trainspotting location.

When we had gathered at the train station, our Chinese tour guide explained that from this point on, we should not take any photographs unless expressly allowed to. Fortunately for this blog’s audience, I’m not that good at following instructions I don’t agree with. Around 9.30am, we then boarded a train that looked like it has been in service since the Second World War, and leave Dandong for Sinuiju (新义州/신의주). As the train begins to move, the group starts singing some kind of train ride song from their childhood days. I imagined them as little Young Pioneers during the Cultural Revolution. Guessing from their age, they would have been elementary or middle school kids at the time.

The train tracks run across the bridge across the Yalu river at Dandong. Perhaps it is more accurate to describe it as one of the one-and-a-half bridges there. The other bridge, right next to it, stops abruptly halfway across. The DPRK side is incomplete, as if they started construction and then just stopped many years ago: The orphaned stone bases resemble little stepping stones across the river. From the window I saw tourists posing for photographs from a little observation deck on the Chinese half, and I waved to them. Farewell, civilization! And then we were past the river, in North Korea.

(Yalu river) I guess you could try to swim the rest of the way, stopping to rest at each stone base, but border security here is probably tightest.

The first thing that greeted us was a bronze statue of Kim Il-Sung, his arm outstretched to the statue of his counterpart across the river. We stopped at Sinuiju station to switch to the Pyongui line. As I waited for the border guards to go through our passports and bags, I looked outside. Above the red text of the station’s name was a faded portrait of the great leader, as if to tell us that he is always watching. When the guard saw that my passport is of a different color he asked our Chinese guide to show him the tour paperwork. I tried to look as inconspicuous as possible.

As the train left Sinuiju for Pyongyang, we passed many more murals and statues of the great and dear leaders, and endless pillars with patriotic messages in red I couldn’t understand. I lost count of how many I saw.

A quick aside: Writing this from a 꽃보다 남자-themed Dunkin’ Donuts in central Seoul as I wait for my friends to get off from work, it strikes me that the juxtaposition of my present environment with what I recall is stark. As many F4 advertisements and posters I’ve seen around the city, they still aren’t quite as ubiquitous.

(Sinanju) Unfortunately I couldn’t take the equivalent picture at Sinuiju station, but they look fairly similar. The red text on the left says ‘long live the great leader comrade Kim Jong-il’.

Along the dirt roads there are few motor vehicles, mostly bicycles and ox-drawn carts. The trucks I saw carried dozens of workers standing. We passed a stream and I saw women carrying babies on their backs washing their clothes there, while the children play in the rice marshes. Maybe it was just my imagination or maybe it was malnutrition – some of them resemble those photographs of Somalian children with distended bellies. Considering the Pyongui line is the ‘nice’ part of the countryside since it’s the one that foreign eyes see most, I wondered how much poorer the rest of the countryside must be.

It was also then that I met my roommate for the duration of the tour, a college student from Anhui who speaks some English and wants to practice with me. Paranoid me immediately imagined that he had been planted by the PRC intelligence services to spy on me, but he seemed fairly harmless. He was here to accompany his aunt and cousins, and one of them (18~19yo) is cute. I told him so, and he replied that that’s all she is. (Chatting her up later, I learned that she hopes to become a flight attendant)

Taedonggang maekju: Great taste of Juche! I have no idea what the 11 on the label is. Maybe the factory’s administrative number?

Our local guides handed out packs of bottled water with our Styrofoam lunch packs, and I scrutinized mine carefully, holding the water up to the light – I saw little dust particles floating in it. The label said ‘koryo sindeoksan’. I suppose Mt. Sindeok’s streams aren’t as pure as they should be, or perhaps it’s the bottling factory. Shortly afterwards, the beverage service began, and the attendants rolled their cart to my cabin. Most of the goods for sale looked like cheap imports of the kind you might see in a mom and pop grocery store – one was a chocolate wafer manufactured in Malaysia. My fellow passengers preferred to drink beer than water, and bought two bottles of Taedong River beer (4.5%) for 5 RMB each, and a pack of myuhyang cigarettes for 10 RMB. As they lit up, I decided it was time to switch cabins.

Ryongseong beer and Sindeok mineral water. I was surprised to see Chinese characters printed on the label, since the DPRK has abandoned hanja, so I presume this is mainly for export to the PRC than domestic consumption.

I wandered into the next cabin to talk to the Chinese guide, who is studying for a local government position. She studied Korean in Seoul and then joined the tour agency as a guide. She tells me that she brings tour groups here throughout the year, and not only during the Mass Games season, so it occurs to me that the combined revenue from PRC-DPRK tourism could exceed that of Koryo Tours et al and Hyundai Asan despite the price differential. Possible research project: Contact all tour operators and compile aggregate tourism revenue data set.

We arrive in Pyongyang around 3.30pm.

Previously on Pyongyang Diaries: Getting There
Next time: Escape from Yanggakdo

It was a time-tested trail: Get to Dandong, join a tour group, and cross the border. Geoffrey had done the same, and before him, different groups of Singapore students at Beida. All I had to do was follow in their footsteps. A Korean friend who studied in Beijing had went up to Dandong but decided to stay on the Chinese side of Mt. Baekdu, peering across the border into the land of the morning calm. That was probably the closest she could get with an ROK passport, at least before the Hyundai Asan tours started.

While I was in Beijing, I googled in Mandarin for chaoxian 朝鮮 (the Chinese transliteration of joseon 조선, the DPRK’s preferred term, and the one used in the PRC, as opposed to searching for the terms beihan 北韩 or hanguo 韩国) and variants of ‘tour’ or ‘travel agency’. I went through the google hits, identified a few travel agencies located in Beijing, and called them up for prices – all were roughly similar since the actual North Korean tour operator was the same. I picked the lowest quote, and made arrangements through them for the visa etc.

(Pyongyang) Our tour bus. Notice it’s joseon, not hanguk.

I stuffed my backpack with some snacks for the ride, a magazine (the Economist), a change of clothes, and my notebooks and cameras (DSLR and point-and-shoot) – didn’t bring my iPhone along. I was warned that tourists’ cell phones weren’t allowed in the DPRK and wouldn’t work even if I sneaked it in (this was prior to the launch of Koryolink) and I didn’t trust them to hold onto it for the duration. I also left word with my close friends that they should expect to hear from me by a certain date, and if they did not, they should assume that I had been detained (or worse) and inform the embassy.

(Enroute to Dandong) Hard sleeper class is pretty decent, actually.

With that done, I hopped on an overnight express train to Dandong. On the way, my fellow travelers (a Dandong local, some kind of mid-level cadre) in the hard sleeper compartment offered me a swig of baijiu. It was the foulest 5RMB moonshine I had ever tasted, though I didn’t tell him that. We talked a bit about Dandong and I asked what he thought about the DPRK. He replied, 哪里没什么好东西. (Trans. There’s nothing good over there.)

(Dandong station) Yalu River Beer, the Chairman’s choice of Revolutionary beverages!

The train rolled into Dandong station, and the first thing I saw out of the station doors was a giant statue of the ChairMao with his right arm stretched out, pointing across the Yalu river as if to extend a hand of friendship toward his revolutionary comrades. Unfortunately, right in front of the statue was also the Dandong Railroad Hotel (next door to the train station), with a giant banner advertisement for Yalu River Beer several stories high immediately facing the Chairman, so it looks like a salute to consumerism. I thought the juxtaposition was brilliant, though I couldn’t get a really good composition from the ground level.

Last time on Pyongyang Diaries: Why I Went
Next: The Tourists

I try to avoid telling my Korean friends in school that I went to the North, because they always look at me strangely and ask why I would ever want to go there. I don’t blame them – some have family histories and bad memories of the place. The immediate assumption is that I’m some kind of sick tourist that delights in seeing the suffering of others, or worse, that I perpetuate it. But that couldn’t be further from the truth.

The reason why I went to North Korea is the same reason why I’m a perennial attendee of all the related speaker events at the Weatherhead Institute, ran across DC to see exhibits at the Woodrow Wilson center and the Library of Congress during my lunch hour, took the train out to some church in Brooklyn to see Yodok Story, and search desperately for online DVD sales of Crossing (크로싱). It lies at the intersection of all my professional and personal interests.

My professional interest is in markets and development i.e. my college major. The DPRK presents one of the most difficult economic development challenges, especially in the transition to a market economy. It is also an important case study of underground economies and illicit trade like narcotics, counterfeiting, proliferation etc. That segues neatly into my other professional interest, political science and international relations i.e. my other major. My personal interest is in the cause of liberty. I went there to try to better understand what it means to live under an authoritarian regime, and by understanding it, try to make a difference.

At first I was hesitant to go on an ‘official’ tour. I knew that the fees charged would go directly into the regime’s hands, and that I would not see anything sensitive anyway. That tourism revenues flow directly into the hands of regime officials means that I would have personally contributed to the perpetuation of the system, and I want to be part of the solution, not the problem.

After some consideration I came to the conclusion that the benefits outweighed the costs. Hyundai Asan’s Kaesong tour business alone has brought a hundred thousand tourists to Kaesong and transferred some 10 million USD to the DPRK so far. That isn’t counting the Kumgang-san tour. And this is just Hyundai Asan – there are many more tour agencies like Koryo Tours etc.

Yes, the tour is a highly profitable business unit for the conglomerate. Perhaps it is naïve but I do not believe the conglomerate would have been allowed to operate it, if it ran counter to its national interest i.e. that ROK officials have made their calculations and found that on net, it makes sense from a national security perspective. Tourism is a more legitimate source of foreign exchange than say, proliferation and counterfeiting, and may displace the latter. It may also be a particularly effective way to undermine regime propaganda – see the photograph above.

Since there is a state monopoly on tourism operation, they can price discriminate, and they base this on country of origin. Koryo Tours, Koreakonsult and other agencies that cater to Westerners charge many thousands of dollars/euros – way above my budget and far more than I was willing to contribute to the regime. The next tier of pricing is for Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan etc. Still too high. I chose to minimize this by making arrangements through a Chinese agency based in Dandong, which is necessarily charged a price more appropriate to the average disposable income on the mainland. I also chose to take the train, which was a lot cheaper than flying there.

So it came to be that I followed Geoffrey’s footsteps and joined a Chinese tour group to the DPRK while I was in Beijing. Thus begin my Pyongyang Diaries.

Next time on Pyongyang Diaries: Getting There