The escalator goes down, and the descent takes four minutes. You stand and watch the tunnel walls crawl past: concrete, cables, concrete again. Four minutes is a long time — the longest escalator in the Moscow metro takes a minute forty, and this one takes twice as long. And with every second you are deeper.
One hundred and ten metres underground. The Pyongyang Metro is one of the deepest in the world: it runs below Moscow’s (74 m at Park Pobedy) and below St. Petersburg’s (86 m at Admiralteyskaya). But unlike Moscow or St. Petersburg, the depth here is not a consequence of geology — it is deliberate.
Four minutes down, deeper than any metro in the world — and there, at 110 metres, hang crystal chandeliers. Why build beauty in a place where almost no one will see it?
The Pyongyang Metro was built as a bomb shelter, and this is not a secret but an architectural decision. The corridors hold armoured doors: heavy, steel, thick as a palm, on massive hinges that groan when they are opened for a demonstration. The doors can be sealed within minutes, turning each station into a hermetic bunker with ventilation systems, air filtration, water reserves and medical stations.
North Korea prepared for nuclear war in earnest — not as an abstraction, but as a schedule. The metro was part of that readiness, and far from the only part: bunkers, tunnels and underground factories were hidden in the mountains across the country. But the metro remained the most visible of them, the most beautiful and the most paradoxical: a bomb shelter with crystal chandeliers, a place designed for the end of the world and decorated like a palace.
When the escalator finally delivers you to the platform — four minutes in which you have had time to think about nuclear war, armoured doors and the meaning of life — you stop and forget what all of this was built for. Because in front of you stands a palace: underground, marble, gleaming.
The columns here are made not of painted concrete but of real marble, pink and grey, brought from Korean quarries. Crystal chandeliers hang from the ceilings, enormous and multi-tiered, as in an opera house. Every station is built as a hall, with high ceilings, arches and bas-reliefs, and the mosaics run the full width of the wall, from floor to ceiling, covering tens of square metres: workers at their lathes, peasants in the fields, soldiers charging, smiling children with flowers. This is socialist realism taken to its absolute: vivid, detailed, masterful. Whatever you may think of the content, the craftsmanship is beyond dispute.
Each of the 16 stations has its own theme and its own décor. Puhŭng (Revival) carries a mosaic of the sun rising over mountains, and Yŏngwang (Glory) a panel of jubilant crowds. All the panels were made by masters of the Mansudae Studio, North Korea’s largest artistic workshop, which employs thousands of painters and sculptors (the same studio produces the monuments that North Korea exports to Africa and Southeast Asia: North Korean-made statues stand in dozens of countries around the world).
And there is a silence here that is strange for a metro. There is no advertising: not a single poster, not a single sticker, not a single screen (in their place, newspapers hang on the platforms in glass display cases — Rodong Sinmun, the organ of the Central Committee of the Workers’ Party). There are no announcements beyond the station names, no musicians and no beggars, no noise of a crowd, though there are people enough on the platform. Everyone is silent or speaks quietly, as in a library or a temple — or like people who are used to not drawing attention to themselves.
A ticket costs 5 won, half an American cent, and this is the cheapest metro on the planet. For comparison: a ride in Moscow costs 62 roubles (about 70 cents), which is 140 times more. The lines are worked by old German carriages from the Berlin metro, bought after German reunification (East Berlin was selling off its rolling stock and Pyongyang was buying it), and by new Chinese ones, bright and air-conditioned. Portraits of the leaders in gilded frames hang on the walls of the old carriages, and the floors are kept to a cleanliness the Tokyo metro would envy.
In all, the metro has two lines and 16 stations (other sources say 17; North Korea does not publish accurate metro maps, and the number of stations remains a subject of debate among foreign researchers). The names are ideological: Puhŭng (Revival), Yŏngwang (Glory), Pulgŭnbyŏl (Red Star), Kaesŏng (Triumph), Kwangmyŏng (Light). Every name sounds like a manifesto, every station works as a museum, and every journey consists of four minutes down the escalator, a ride between stations and four minutes back up.
For a long time foreigners were allowed to see only two stations: they were shuttled back and forth and shown the showcase halls. A conspiracy theory duly appeared — do the other stations exist at all, or is the metro a prop with two decorative halls and nothing behind them? The theory dissolved in the 2010s, when North Korea began letting visitors travel the whole route: every station turned out to be real, and every one of them had marble and chandeliers.
Ride there and back and it adds up to eight minutes of escalator a day. Eight minutes in which you stand on a step, look at the grey concrete tunnel walls with their cables and ventilation pipes, and wonder how deep you are right now — thirty metres, fifty, eighty? And what is above your head, how many tons of rock lie between you and the sun?
You ride back up, and those four minutes look exactly the same: the same concrete walls, the same cables, the same hum of ventilation. Then daylight appears, your eyes adjust, and you are standing on a pavement — wide, empty, perfectly clean. Not a single cigarette butt, not a single scrap of paper, not a single trodden lump of chewing gum (gum is scarce in North Korea, and chewing it in the street is not done).
Above you spreads a city that exists on no Google map. It was built for three million people, but it looks as though only thousands live in it. The Arch of Triumph rises 60 metres here, ten metres higher than the one in Paris (North Koreans point this out at every opportunity). The Juche Idea Tower reaches 170 metres, the height of a fifty-storey building, and the torch at its summit burns through the night. And the Ryugyong pyramid hotel, 330 metres and 105 floors, has stood unfinished since 1992 and is visible from every point in the city, yet it is absent from the official maps of Pyongyang: 330 metres of concrete that seemingly do not exist.
The streets here are as wide as runways, and they were built for parades and tanks rather than for pedestrians. They are also empty: there are few cars, and a private vehicle in North Korea is a privilege. In place of traffic lights there are traffic controllers, young women in blue uniforms with batons, who stand at the intersections with the posture of ballet dancers and conduct a traffic that barely exists. They are one of the most photographed “sights” of Pyongyang and one of the most enigmatic.
In the evening it is worth walking along the embankment of the Taedong River, where the lights are reflected in the water and the torch of the Juche Tower burns on the far bank. The Ryugyong pyramid is lit by LED panels: on one side run propaganda animations, the North Korean flag and slogans, while the other side stays dark. Half the building glows and half does not, and it looks like a metaphor for the whole country: one side made for display, the other for the people who live inside it.
Such is Pyongyang, the capital of the most closed country in the world: a city where the metro doubles as a bomb shelter with chandeliers, where the tallest hotel is officially invisible, where the boulevards run eight lanes wide though there are barely enough cars for one, and where traffic controllers stand at the intersections like ballerinas, conducting the air.
And you are inside it.
A year after this metro opened, in January 1968, something happened in the waters off the North Korean coast that nearly started a nuclear war. It brought together an American ship, 83 crew members and a captain who made a choice that would be argued over for half a century.
A year after this metro opened, an event off the North Korean coast would almost start a nuclear war: an American ship, 83 people on board and a choice that would be disputed for half a century.
