North Korea: The Landmark Nation
Volume 3 | Issue 4 - Landmarks
Article by Stephen Woodward. Edited by Tom Hartley
2012 is set to be a big year for North Korea (aka the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea, DPRK). This year will mark two significant landmarks for the infamously secretive pariah state. The most important of these will be the 100th anniversary of the birth of the so called ‘Great Leader’ Kim-Il-Sung. The other significant landmark set to be celebrated is what would have been the 70th birthday of recently deceased ‘Dear Leader’ Kim-Jong-Il. The DPRK, as you may well know, is built around a cult of personality so the landmark anniversaries of these two god like former leaders are no doubt set to be a huge occasion. As the DPRK website itself proclaims ‘this will become a historic moment and the country will have the biggest celebrations since the creation of the republic’. For a nation that ‘loves’ its supposedly magnificent and benevolent leaders these anniversaries will be a major landmark.
Kim-Il-Sung, the ‘Great Leader’ of the DPRK, was born in 1922. He was installed as the leader of the North Korean people by Stalin and Lavrenty Beria, at the end of the Second World War, following a period serving for the Soviet Red Army. Kim quickly established a cult of personality around himself and his family, altering history, ensuring that he was worshipped as a god by the North Korean people. Landmarks commemorating the greatness of Kim-Il-Sung litter North Korean cities. There are over 500 statues of the ‘Great Leader.’ It is even customary for newly married couples, immediately following their ceremony to lay flowers at the foot of the nearest Kim statue and pose for their wedding photos overshadowed by the ‘Great Leader.’
The celebration of Kim-Il-Sung’s birth is far from being an exceptional event in North Korea. His birthday is celebrated every year, marked by a 2 month long festival, The Arirang Mass Games. Citizens are chosen at as young an age as 5 to take part and will typically train the entire year, with no other vocation, until their day of retirement.
Participants in their thousands put on gymnastic and synchronised card displays that tell the story of the history of the DPRK, putting especial praise on the roles of Kim-Il-Sung as the father of the nation and Kim-Jong-Il as the protector of it’s continued integrity. This landmark event has naturally been linked with landmark architecture, requiring the construction of the Rungrado May Day Stadium, which with a capacity of 150,000 is the world’s largest by capacity.
At his death in 1994 public grief was on an unbelievable scale, grown men wept in the streets. He also remained the head of state after his death, installed as the Eternal President. This makes the DPRK the only country in the world with a dead head of state. Kim-Il-Sung, like Lenin, is also permanently preserved and on display. Following his death Kim-Jong-Il spent $100 million (some estimates say $900 million) converting the colossal Kumsusan Assembly Hall into a permanent mausoleum for his dead father. It is now planned for Kim-Jong-Il to also be preserved similarly in a glass sarcophagus alongside Kim-Il-Sung.
North Korea has a habit of inaugurating such landmarks that glorify its leadership on such anniversaries. In 1982 Pyongyang saw the creation of two such monuments. Firstly the Juche Tower was erected on the edge of Kim-Il-Sung Square. The tower purportedly designed by Kim-Jong-Il was built to glorify his father’s own ideology: Juche (best summed up as a fairly unoriginal blend of autarky and social nationalism, virtually Hitler without the anti-Semitism). The tower consists of 25,550 granite blocks, one for each day of Il-Sung’s life (365 x 70). In the same year the Arch of Triumph was also unveiled in Pyongyang. The arch at 60 metres is the world’s tallest triumphal arch, deliberately planned to be taller than the Arc De Triomphe on which it is clearly modelled. It commemorates yet again the struggle of the Korean people against foreign imperialist aggressors and yes, you’ve guessed it, glorifies the role of Kim-Il-Sung in this resistance.
As part of the celebrations for the 100th anniversary of Kim-Il-Sung the DPRK is intending to officially open a number of ‘landmarks’. Most striking of these is the Ryugyong Hotel. The hotel began construction under Kim-Il-Sung in 1987, as a petty response to a South Korean consortium constructing the world’s tallest hotel in Singapore 1986. The intended completion date had been 1989, in time for the 13th World Youth Festival being held in Pyongyang, however, the 1083 foot Ryugyong stood unfinished for 16 years. It was not until 2008 that construction restarted, led by Egyptian mobile company Orascom, who have now completed the exterior work, but the interior is unlikely to be ready for Kim’s anniversary, as the construction is said to be shoddy, to the extent of having crooked elevator shafts. The Ryugyong had stood for years towering over the Pyongyang skyline as a landmark of the failures of the DPRK. The government even denied the existence of the building, despite its dominance over the capital’s skyline and its appearance on North Korean stamps.
North Korea is the perfect confluence of the two strands which dominate this New Histories issue on landmarks. It is a country that revels in celebrating historical milestone landmarks, either to do with how glorious the DPRK has been in resistance or the glory of its two Great and Dear Leaders. Meanwhile the DPRK is also a country that revels in erecting landmarks to commemorate historical events, constantly striving to have the world’s largest and greatest monumental architecture, regardless whether in a country stricken with poverty and hunger it can be afforded. The isolated nature of North Korea, a seemingly twentieth century nation stuck in a twenty first century world, means that it has become a landmark in itself. It endures as a landmark of a lost world of Orwellian totalitarian states still fighting the Cold War.