PYONGYANG’S BUILDINGS AND MONUMENTS
Pyongyang is a city of grandiosity, and the sheer ingenuity of the buildings and monuments overwhelmed me. The Grand Theater, with a surface area of 322,920 square feet (30,000 square meters)—an area larger than five American football fields—allows 700 artists to perform in front of 2,200 spectators. The Grand People’s Study House, one of the world’s largest libraries, extends across a space of 1,076,391 square feet (100,000 square meters) and can hold up to thirty million books.
North Korea is also known for its two circuses: one run by the military and another—and some would say even more impressive—troupe that performs on a surface area of 753,473 square feet (70,000 square meters), holding daily performances in front of up to 3,500 spectators. The Mansudae Assembly Hall, where North Korea’s parliament, known as the Supreme People’s Assembly, holds its sessions, has an area of 484,375 square feet (45,000 square meters). It’s a stretch equivalent to eight football fields. The Tower of the Juche Idea (Juche Tower), built on Kim Il Sung’s seventieth birthday, is covered with 25,550 pieces of granite, each representing a day in the life of the Great Leader.
The Mangyongdae Children’s Palace is a six-story building where youngsters can dabble in extracurricular activities like martial arts, music, and foreign languages. It’s at the Street of the Heroic Youth and contains hundreds of rooms that can accommodate 5,400 children. One iconic luxury building and the second-largest operating hotel in the country, the Koryo Hotel, sits in central Pyongyang with a total floor space of 904,170 square feet (84,000 square meters), comprising two 470-foot (143-meter)-high connected towers with revolving restaurants on top. Up to 1,000 guests can stay in 504 rooms on 45 floors—a height that some would consider an urban feat in Pyongyang.
The statues of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il stand before the mosaic of Paekdu Mountain. Kim Il Sung’s statue was built in 1972 in honor of his sixtieth birthday. According to Confucian tradition, the sixtieth birthday is a particularly celebrated event because it closes a cycle, at the end of which the names of the years are repeated in Chinese and Korean.
In addition to the behemoth buildings, I gasped at the surfeit of monuments. The most recognizable shrine—lined across foreign newspapers and photographs of this people’s republic—is the 60-foot (18-meter)-high bronze statue of the eternal president, Kim Il Sung. His figure stands triumphantly in front of a mosaic on a wall, a dense packing of stones that make up a panorama of Paekdu Mountain, known as the birthplace of the Korean people. That image also has a special meaning in North Korean culture because Kim Il Sung and his guerrillas fought the Japanese colonialists from this mountain. In April 2012, authorities revealed a second bronze figure of the late leader Kim Jong Il, positioned next to his father’s statue (please see illustration on previous page).
What strikes visitors here is the embellishment of the Kims’ features, making their statues look manlier and stronger—in a manner similar to how sculptors emphasized the rakish qualities of Roman emperors. North Korean publications call the Kims the “peerless leaders.” They are presented as benevolent rulers who, according to Confucian belief, have earned gratitude and loyalty. Confucianism was the dominant value system of the Chosun Dynasty from 1392 to 1910, before Korea was colonized by Japan until 1945.
Although the Korean Workers’ Party rejected the Confucian philosophy, which stemmed from feudal China, the authoritarian strain from Confucianism did not disappear. Rather, it was transformed by the wave of socialism and Juche, the ideology of self-reliance. In other words, the old Confucian tradition of repaying debts of gratitude with unquestioned devotion is firmly upheld today, as seen in the numerous visitors bowing in front of the statues.
Other effigies take on mythical qualities, drawing on the potency of Korean legend to uphold the glory of the state. The statue of the Chollima, the Korean equivalent of a winged horse or Pegasus and the largest of its kind in Pyongyang, is 50 feet (16 meters) high and stands on a 110-foot (34-meter)-tall granite footing in a 53,820 square foot (5,000-square meter) park. According to a Korean myth, this untamed horse could travel 245 miles (393 kilometers), about the equivalent of the north-south length of the entire Korean Peninsula, in a single day. On the back of the horse sits a worker with a message from the party Central Committee and a female farmer with rice, flying up to the skies to spread the party’s glorious message all over the country.
The Chollima symbol has also been used on other occasions, such as to promote rapid economic development with the slogan “Charge forward with the speed of the Chollima!” which is meant to inspire people to work hard. The Chollima movement in the 1960s was the Korean version of the Chinese Great Leap Forward movement in the late 1950s. But Kim Il Sung’s economic drive was more successful than the Chinese model. North Korea completed its 1957-61 five-year plan two years ahead of schedule, which it celebrated in 1961 by building the bronze Chollima statue.
A small section of the Pyongyang city map, marking just a handful of its many grand buildings.
Not every building in North Korea is a drab, Soviet-style block. The People’s Culture Palace and the People’s Grand Study House have impressive traditional Korean tiled roof designs. Parts of the city even have a slight European touch: Greek-style theaters, neoclassical congress halls, and an Arch of Triumph have been built, the final as a tribute to Korean resistance fighters against Japanese colonialism from 1925 to 1945. The arch is similar to Paris’s Arc de Triomphe, a testament of national power commissioned by Napoleon in the early nineteenth century.
The only minor difference is that it is 30 feet (10 meters) higher, but overall it gives an international flair to the narrative of North Korean glory. Other examples aren’t quite façades of antiquity, but give off a more contemporary chic vibe. Wavelike and cylindrical apartment blocks line the relatively affluent neighborhoods along Liberation Street (in Korean, Kwangbok Street), located about 5 miles (8 kilometers) west of the city center.
In 1991, Kim Jong Il coined the term “Juche architecture,” which he defined as the expression of “the harmony of national virtues and the modernity in the design.” It was meant to develop a distinctive national identity, separate from the rest of the world, although Soviet influence was imposed on North Korean edifices.
These projects also display a sort of North Korean craft-excellence, the ability of the efficient command government to pool together labor and resources and to impress their imagery on citizens. In most laissez-faire economies, scarce resources usually aren’t allocated so quickly and efficiently.
NEIGHBORHOOD LIFE
Apartment blocks could go somewhat high to forty floors, a minor feat that places Pyongyang ahead of poor but growing cities like Phnom Penh, Cambodia, and Yangon, Burma. Still, while many around the world enjoy the view of a penthouse flat up top, North Koreans preferred, for more practical reasons, modest rooms near the bottom. Elevators frequently broke down thanks to the regular power cuts, a nightmare because they’d instead have to take a dozen flights of stairs.
When there was no electricity to operate the water pumps, residents carried empty buckets and tubs to taps on the street, or they fetched their water from rivers for cooking and washing. In the countryside, where everyday life remains starkly different from that of the capital, people get water from simple old village wells. During the wintertime, people carry water upstairs as water pipes are bound to freeze, at least in the upper floors of unheated buildings.
Regardless of power supplies, I had to get used to the fact that we didn’t have running water all the time.