Pyongyang was built for three million people: wide boulevards, tall buildings, monuments — and almost no one on the streets.
The first thing that strikes you is not the ideology, not the portraits of the leaders and not the propaganda, but the emptiness. The city was built for millions, yet only thousands are out on the streets. The boulevards are as wide as runways and almost deserted. There are few cars — a private vehicle is a rarity in North Korea — and few pedestrians either. At the intersections, though, stand the traffic controllers: young women in uniform conducting, with their batons, a flow of traffic that barely exists.
The architecture here is monumental, and everything is deliberately oversized: larger than necessary and larger than anywhere else. Kim Il-sung Square covers 75,000 square metres and holds hundreds of thousands of people during parades. For comparison, Red Square covers 23,000 m² and Tiananmen 44,000 m², so Pyongyang’s is bigger than both.
The Arch of Triumph rises 60 metres, taller than the Paris arch with its 50. It was built in 1982 out of 25,000 granite blocks — one for every day Kim Il-sung had lived up to that point. Your guide will be sure to say, “Our arch is taller,” and will be right.
The Juche Idea Tower is built of white granite and rises 170 metres, with a flame at its top that burns through the night. Of those 170 metres, 150 belong to the tower itself — roughly one metre for each of Kim Il-sung’s birthdays up to his seventieth — and 20 to the flame. Such is the mathematics of ideology. A lift takes you up to the observation deck, and all of Pyongyang lies at your feet: the Taedong River, six bridges, the boulevards, the pink, blue and green rooftops of the apartment blocks. On the horizon stands the Ryugyong, an unfinished pyramid 330 metres tall that has been standing there in silence ever since.
All of it was built for scale and for impression, for that “wow”, and the trick works. Whatever you think of the regime, standing in Kim Il-sung Square and looking at the Grand People’s Study House — a copy of the US Capitol, only larger — you feel that scale physically, like pressure.
But between the monuments there is life. Not the kind shown in Western documentaries, grim, grey and hopeless, as if the whole country were one big camp. And not the kind shown by North Korean propaganda, happy, flourishing and perfect, as if problems did not exist. A third kind, real and quiet, not obvious, because you have to see it for yourself rather than read about it.
Children in school uniform, neat, with backpacks and red scarves, walk along the pavement, chattering and giggling. Like children everywhere. A woman with a shopping bag crosses a vast boulevard diagonally rather than at the crossing, because there are no cars anyway. A man in a suit reads a newspaper on a bench — the very same Rodong Sinmun he reads every day, because there is no other. An old woman sells yellow and white chrysanthemums at the entrance to a park. A young man wheels an old Chinese bicycle with no gears. This is the ordinary life of ordinary people in an extraordinary place, the life BBC cameras never capture and Korean television never shows.
At the Mangyongdae Schoolchildren’s Palace, thousands of children spend their afternoons on music, dance, calligraphy, science, sport, embroidery and computers — yes, North Korea teaches programming, on the domestic Red Star OS, a Linux clone. If you are lucky, you will catch a concert, and it will astonish you.
Children of eight or ten play accordions, kayagums (a Korean zither) and drums, sing in clean harmony without a single false note, and dance with a synchrony that is impossible without thousands of hours of rehearsal. They smile brilliantly, identically, all at once. It is breathtaking and unsettling at the same time, because a child should not smile on schedule. But the smiles seem real, or look real, or you simply cannot tell the difference. Another question North Korea does not answer.
The Hwasong beer bar: yes, North Korea has beer bars, and this is one of the most unexpected moments of the journey. You walk in and find yourself in an ordinary bar with a counter, taps, glasses and tables. The local Taedonggang beer is brewed in seven varieties, from pale to dark, and is named after the Taedong River that flows through Pyongyang. The brewery was built in 2002, when the entire equipment of the shuttered British brewery Ushers of Trowbridge was bought and shipped to North Korea. The taste is decent, and some visitors call it good: its RateBeer rating is higher than that of many European beers. The atmosphere is relaxed, people sit at tables drinking beer and talking, as in any bar in the world, only with portraits on the walls and no Wi-Fi.
The Central Zoo is another place where ideology recedes into the background. Children laugh and pull their parents by the hand towards the monkey enclosure. A couple eats ice cream on a bench, he in military uniform, she in a bright dress. An old man feeds the ducks by the pond. A group of schoolgirls takes photos on a phone, and yes, North Korea has smartphones, domestically produced, with a local intranet instead of the internet. An ordinary zoo with ordinary people in an extraordinary country.
The Tomb of Tangun is another stop on the programme and another layer. Tangun is considered the mythical founder of Korea; by legend he was the son of a heavenly god and a bear who turned into a woman. North Korea regards the tomb as real, and the scale matches: a vast white-stone structure, reconstructed in the 1990s. Historians argue about its authenticity, and North Koreans do not argue at all: for them Tangun is an ancestor, and Korea is the world’s oldest civilisation, with 5,000 years of history. You will listen to all of it, nod, and go on thinking.
In the evening you can take a trip along the Taedong River: an hour on a pleasure cruiser, optional, for $30. The lights of the embankments reflect in the water, and the six bridges are lit up, each in its own colour. Along the riverbank joggers run and couples and families with children stroll. An ordinary evening in an extraordinary city and an ordinary life, except that you are watching it through a lens you cannot remove.
Pyongyang is a city of contrasts: monumental and empty, ideological and human, austere and yet alive, if you look away from the monuments and pay attention to the people, to their faces, their hands, their shoes. It is alive in its own way, not the way Moscow, Tokyo or New York are. And that “own way” is reason enough to come.
