An armored ZIS-110 automobile that Stalin gave to Kim Il-sung, a silver cup from Muammar Gaddafi, crocodile leather from Fidel Castro, a basketball autographed by Michael Jordan and presented by Madeleine Albright — and so on for 117,000 gifts in 100 halls inside a mountain.
The International Friendship Exhibition is one of the strangest places on Earth, and at the same time one of the most impressive, regardless of how you feel about the DPRK.
The Myohyang Mountains, the “fragrant mountains”, form a scenic range 150 kilometers northwest of Pyongyang. The drive from the capital takes three hours and runs through rice paddies, past villages and past propaganda billboards along the roadside (there are no commercial billboards in the DPRK — agitprop stands in their place). The mountains rise like a wall of dense forest, waterfalls and crystal-clear rivers, and the air here is entirely different: clean, moist, smelling of pine and wet moss. After Pyongyang, it feels like exhaling.
And hidden inside these mountains is a concrete bunker the size of a shopping mall, cut into the rock and, once again, bomb-proof. It holds gifts presented to the DPRK’s leaders by heads of state, governments and organizations from around the world.
The exhibition consists of two buildings: one for gifts to Kim Il-sung, the other for gifts to Kim Jong-il (and, presumably, by now for Kim Jong-un, though a separate building has yet to be built). Both are underground, carved into the mountain’s bedrock. The way in is through massive doors bearing the DPRK coat of arms, heavy as a bank vault’s, and beyond them begin air-conditioned corridors of marble and carpet.
The total floor area is estimated at between 28,000 and 70,000 square meters: the figures vary because the DPRK publishes no exact numbers, and independent estimates rest on satellite imagery of the entrances and on visitor accounts. There are more than 150 halls, holding by various estimates between 60,000 and 220,000 gifts. The official figure is 117,000, but it hasn’t been updated in years, and gifts keep arriving.
Your guide will take you through ten or fifteen halls, because seeing all 150 in a single visit is impossible — that would take days. Each hall is a country or a region, decorated in that country’s style: the Russian one with birches and samovars, the Chinese one with dragons, the Arab one with carpets. The gifts stand in display cases, lit from within and labeled with who gave them, when, and on what occasion.
So the halls spread out across Russia, China, the countries of Africa, Latin America, Europe, the Middle East and Southeast Asia, and the gifts themselves run from the monumental to the tiny. In the central hall stands the ZIS-110, the armored limousine Stalin gave to Kim Il-sung, black and polished to a mirror shine. Beside it live an armored railway car from Mao Zedong, crocodile leather from Fidel Castro, elephant tusks from Africa, a silver cup from Gaddafi and a crystal vase from Ceaușescu. And somewhere among all of it lies a basketball autographed by Michael Jordan, presented by Madeleine Albright, the US Secretary of State, during her visit in 2000.
The rules here are strict. At the entrance you are handed shoe covers, because the floor is polished to a mirror finish, backpacks and bags go into a cloakroom, and photography is forbidden outright. This is one of the few places in the DPRK with a total ban on cameras — in most others you can shoot freely, and guides will even help you find the angle. On the way out you will be asked, politely but firmly, to write something in the guestbook, and your guide will be standing beside you. Most people write something neutral like “Impressive collection” or “Thank you for the guided visit”, and that is enough.
Inside, it all feels like a museum multiplied by a bunker and then by a temple: silence, conditioned air, marble, carpet runners and an overwhelming sense of scale. Hall after hall, corridor after corridor, floor after floor. You can walk for hours and still not see everything.
The point of the exhibition is to show that the whole world respects the DPRK’s leaders. Every gift here counts as recognition, and every hall as a country that is a “friend”. Is it propaganda? Undoubtedly, and manipulation too, since gifts are given out of diplomatic courtesy rather than admiration. But the scale is striking regardless of your political views.
The 150 halls hold decades of diplomacy, from Stalin to the present day, and thousands of objects, from postage stamps to armored railway cars. All of it sits inside a mountain, in a rock-cut bunker that would probably survive a direct nuclear hit. The temperature inside stays constant at 20 degrees Celsius year-round, and the humidity is controlled. A museum storage facility on the scale of an underground city.
Like the metro, like so much in the DPRK, the exhibition was built to last forever — in case forever turns out to be shorter than planned.
And 100 kilometers from here, moored in the Pothong River canal, sits the ship of a man who chose humiliation over a fight. Bucher surrendered the Pueblo to save his crew, and the DPRK turned his ship into an exhibit of victory. The gifts in the Myohyang Mountains are about diplomacy and the Pueblo is about war, but both say the same thing: how states build their stories out of gifts, trophies and other people’s choices.
Everyone who has been there argues about the strangest exhibit. Some name Mao’s armored railway car, others remember an inlaid casket from Saddam Hussein, and others vote for Albright’s basketball (Kim Jong-il was a serious NBA fan, and that is not a joke). But for most Russian visitors the most striking room turns out to be the Russian hall, which gathers Stalin’s ZIS-110, a set of matryoshka dolls, a model of the cruiser Aurora, Soviet orders and medals, and letters from Khrushchev. These gifts tell the story of two countries — from friendship to the cold shoulder and back again.
After the exhibition comes a walk through the Myohyang Mountains. The name translates as “fragrant mountains”, and it earns it: pine needles, moss, fallen leaves, damp earth. Trails lead through dense forest, past waterfalls and over wooden bridges across streams, and the oaks, pines and maples stand like walls. In October, when the journey takes place, the forest burns red, yellow and orange. The Korean autumn is famous for its colors, and Myohyang is one of the best places to see them.
The silence here is nothing like Pyongyang’s. Pyongyang’s silence is artificial, made by the absence of noise that ought to be there; the mountain silence is natural, made by the presence of a nature that needs no sound. All you hear is birds, a stream and wind in the canopy, and in that silence comes peace.
The night is spent up in the mountains, at the Hyangsan Hotel: simple, clean, with a view of the forest from the window. It stands far from Pyongyang, from the monuments, from the armored doors and from the ideology, with nothing around but forest, a river and stars. And the feeling arrives that the DPRK is not only what the news shows.
And the next day the road leads back to the city, the one that looks like a stage set and keeps its silence all the while.
