North Korea Journal

by Michael Palin

  The train is clean and modern, with a stainless-steel jug and what looks very much like a spittoon on the window shelf of my four-berth sleeping compartment. Our sound recordist, Doug, snaps a picture of Jaimie, Nick, Neil and me at the moment of departure. We pull out on time, at half-past five. For hour upon hour there’s little to see but an unbroken wall of apartment blocks – the tendrils of the city stretching insatiably into the countryside, before merging again with the tendrils of another city that looks exactly the same.

  Late supper. Not a bad meal. Garlic shoots, pork and onions; strong and tasty, with cold Budweiser and Great Wall red wine.

  I try to sleep but without much success. Cigarette smoke drifts into the compartment from a group talking loudly out in the corridor. I bury my head in the phrase book.

  ANNYONGHASIMNIKKA. NANUN YONGGUKSARAM IMNIDA. Hello, I’m English.

  It’s coming up to seven as we approach Dandong and I’m looking out of the train window. Rubbish lies scattered by the track. Ranks of residential blocks, thirty or forty storeys high, surfaced in naked grey concrete, block any wider view. Nothing much to catch and hold the eye. A few minutes later, we slide into a modern, functional, spotlessly clean station, floored in polished grey granite. A sign reading ‘Please Stand Firm’ is not a propaganda slogan but a safety warning as we prepare to descend the escalator. And it’s not the only sign in English. Another exhorts us to ‘Safely travel, Orderly travel, Warmly travel’.

  Time enough before we embark on the train to Pyongyang to walk down to the river for a last look at China. Dandong’s downtown glitters and gleams with chrome and aluminium. Somewhat to my surprise a huge statue of Mao Zedong stands across the square from a state-of-the-art Starbucks. He’s leaning forward, clad in a greatcoat, arm extended towards Beijing, his back to the wide river that marks the border with North Korea. The plinth alone is the size of a building.

  There are one and a half girder bridges over the river. The complete one, known as the China–North Korea Friendship bridge, was opened in May 1943, the year I was born. The other, known familiarly as the Broken Bridge, was bombed by the Americans during the Korean War and ends abruptly in midstream. A line of tourists are walking out along it, as far as they can go, stopping at the end to stare at North Korea. On the riverside promenade a group of Chinese women are taking selfies beside the cherry blossom. A long, booming waterfront extends away to the north. To the south, on the Korean side, there is little sign of anything much more than grass and mud.

  Back at Dandong station, we climb aboard our North Korean train. It’s trim and tidy with white-and-green striped coaches, hauled by a big old Chinese locomotive. We pull out of Dandong and rumble across the river, known as the Yalu to the Chinese and the Amnok to the Koreans, that marks the border between China and the Democratic People’s Republic.

  It’s a slow crossing. A socialist market economy slips away and a largely unreformed command economy starts to emerge between the flashing black beams of the bridge. Once across we are in a very different environment. Instead of cars and shops there are people and bicycles and dusty construction sites. Instead of skyscrapers there are sheds. Activity on either side of the train is modest and the whole place feels sleepy. The platforms at Sinuiju station are deserted apart from soldiers standing to attention as we draw in. Portraits of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il, the Great Leaders, hang side by side, on one wall, neat rather than boastful in size. It may feel a bit of an anticlimax, but we are, at last, in North Korea.

  We are confined to ‘tourist’ coaches and kept out of contact with the locals. For some reason there’s one fewer tourist coach today so those making the journey are squashed tighter than usual: Dutch, Austrians, Brits, Canadians, Chinese. Before we can leave for Pyongyang there will be extensive customs and immigration checks. As these are carried out, tall young women with close-fitting white shirts, black trousers, stiletto heels and ponytails wheel snack trollies onto the platform with military precision.

  A squad of soldiers in olive-green uniforms and very wide-brimmed caps come down the carriage, almost comically dislodging each other’s headgear as they consult closely with each other about our filming equipment. I’m asked if I have any Bibles in my bag (they’re phobic about missionaries) or any guidebooks, maps or American films. I’m learning that a sense of independence is the first thing you give up when you enter North Korea. So far the locals seem alternately suspicious of and fascinated by us foreigners. Hence the combination of military cross-questioning on the train and laughing girls with snack trollies when we’re finally allowed off onto the platform.

  There’s a metal emblem on the side of the train with a red star shining out above a motif of hydroelectric dams and power cables, but as we pull out of Sinuiju that promise of concrete modernity is replaced by timeless agricultural vistas of ploughed fields and small-scale settlements. North Korea is a predominantly mountainous country. Only 20 per cent of the land is cultivable, so it’s left to coastal plains like the one we’re crossing to produce vital food supplies. They do so with little sign of mechanisation. Men and women cycle between the rice paddies, or walk by with buckets or baskets. Others squat down, planting shoots and seeds. Geese occupy freshly flooded fields. Carts are drawn by oxen, muzzled to prevent them eating the precious produce. Every few hundred yards blasts from the engine’s horn warn people away from the track, but at the speed we’re going there’s plenty of time to get out of the way. It’s as if the country’s moving in slow motion.

  The compartment is cramped, with three bunks stacked up on either side, so as soon as we can, we retreat to the restaurant car. This is bright and clean. The food is freshly cooked in a spotless galley and served by waitresses in blue aprons with 1950s air hostesses’ hats. There’s a fixed menu.

  All the dishes are carefully laid out in separate bowls in front of me: cabbage soup, spring greens and onions, chicken, prawn, beef stir-fry, hard-boiled eggs and kimchi, the Korean staple, made from fermented cabbage in a spicy sauce. I wash it all down with a cold beer. It reminds me of what dining cars used to be like in England, and can no longer be bothered to be. A feeling of great contentment comes over me as I look out at the Korean countryside. There seems to be a concerted tree-planting programme beside the track. The villages we pass are neat and well kept, though my cynical side has me wondering if that’s because they’re beside the main railway line.

  If I get bored looking out of the window, I can watch a wall-mounted TV screen which plays an assembly of clips of Kim Jong Un, smiling broadly as he inspects rocket assembly lines and fires off ballistic missiles to polite applause. These are interspersed with an eclectic mix of images – rows of tanks lined up on a beach, starbursts, girls playing violins, a scattering of engineering achievements, recently erected children’s sports palaces, holiday resorts and stunning mountain scenery. All set to stirring patriotic music. It’s a mixture of the Brit Awards, Last Night of the Proms and an arms sales conference.

  As we draw closer to Pyongyang there are the first signs of industry, but industry from an earlier era. Brickworks with very tall chimneys, an occasional warehouse, yards and railway sidings. Bulky housing blocks improved with pale washes of colour. The faces of the Great Leaders, always equal in size, always side by side and neatly framed, smile down from displays, looking avuncular, and about as threatening as a Specsavers ad. Their likenesses are sometimes accompanied by the heraldic symbols of the regime: a hammer, a sickle and a calligraphy brush. Industry, farming and culture.

  It’s early evening by the time we reach Pyongyang. Peering out of the window with more than usual curiosity I’m a little disappointed to see a largely conventional modern city, with nothing that immediately catches the eye apart from a futuristic glass pyramid which rises high above the surrounding buildings like something from outer space. I later learn that this is the Ryugyong Hotel, built in 1987 but still, mysteriously, unoccupied. In fact, at over a thousand feet h
igh, it is officially the Tallest Unoccupied Building in the World.

  Awaiting us on the platform are my two guides. One introduces herself as Li So Hyang (Li being the family name). She’s in her late twenties, short, pale-skinned and neatly dressed in a skirt and tailored jacket. Her smile and proffered hand make me feel she’s done this sort of thing before. The other guide is a slightly older man, Li Hyon Chol, in a suit and smiling too, but with less assurance.

  Accompanying the guides but hovering more discreetly in the background are a small gaggle of officials. They represent our hosts, the Korea International Travel Company and the National Tourism Administration. Nick tells me that despite the heavy-duty titles, they are a profit-motivated company. I can’t catch any of their names apart from Mrs Kim, a short middle-aged woman who seems to have some authority. The rest are all men. In their identical dark suits and ties, they bear a forbidding resemblance to the cast of Reservoir Dogs.

  Normally on my journeys these are just the sort of people we’d avoid. They have agendas. There are things they want you to see, which are not what you want to see, and vice versa. But we know the rules here. There is no such thing as unrestricted access, especially if you’re from the West and accompanied by a film crew, and we will probably be seeing most of these people most of the time for the next two weeks.

  But we’ve arrived, and that in itself is something of an achievement. We have not been stopped from filming as we emerge from the train, and no one has objected to Jaimie discreetly swinging his camera away from us to pick up some valuable glimpses of platform life. Parents meeting children. Couples reunited.

  And Pyongyang station feels somehow familiar. With its ornate octagonal clock tower and stone-columned colonnade, it’s not unlike something you’d find in Europe. Our ‘minders’ escort us to cars waiting in the forecourt. So Hyang is the only one who can pull off a natural smile. The others do their best, but in their eyes there is only anxiety. We are, after all, as much an unknown quantity to them as they are to us. This is my first glimpse of the streets of Pyongyang. There are cars about, but fewer than you’d expect and for a capital city on a Saturday night everything is markedly un-frenetic. It’s a short ride to the hotel, but enough to register the dimness of the street lighting and the absence of any advertising hoardings.

  Our hotel is called the Koryo, one of the ancient names for Korea. It comprises two forty-storey towers, bridged halfway up. Inside, the design is bland and modern. But then pretty much all of Pyongyang is modern. It was bombed flat by the Americans in the 1950s. Of the old city, I’m told, only one house remains.

  We’ve been travelling for the best part of twenty-five hours since leaving Beijing, and with our camera equipment impounded in a hotel room for customs clearance, there is nothing more we can do but enjoy the delights of the hotel bar. Not easy at first to get served as the entire staff are glued to screens running and re-running the meeting between the North and South Korean leaders. What is striking from the footage is the ease with which Kim Jong Un presents himself. He seems very much the man in control. Rolling like a Cromer fisherman, smiling broadly, hand extended, exuding chumminess. You would think from his body language that the leaders were old buddies, rather than two men representing mutually exclusive systems who had never met each other before.

  The North Korean newsreader comes on. She is a regal figure, middle-aged, quite stout, and wearing national dress, a doll-like outfit with a sash tightly drawn across her chest. She’s known locally as the Pink Lady. She sits behind a desk and delivers the news with authoritarian immobility, with no inter-cuts or changes of camera angle.

  She may not personify excitement but there’s no doubt from her voice that this meeting in the Demilitarized Zone is being seen as a defining moment. Everyone is agog. No one can quite believe what they’re seeing. And all we want is a beer.

  A LOW RESONATING VIBRATION. A LONG-DRAWN-OUT CHORD that seems to be coming from everywhere around me. It’s an eerie, ethereal, synthesised sound – like something Brian Eno might have created. I check the clock. It’s 6 a.m. I turn over, pull the blanket over my head and try to ignore it. But there’s no escape. The sound is everywhere. Not particularly loud, but eerily insinuating and impossible to ignore. I swing myself out of bed and peer through the curtains into the pale dawn light.

  Across the street are three high-rise blocks. They look grey and ghostly. No lights are on. There is no traffic at all in the street, twenty-five storeys below. No sign of a human being, anywhere. The growing awareness of where I am, in a country that has for so long been on everyone’s hate lists, begins to nag away at me. The mysterious soundtrack, the grey and lifeless buildings – it all seems to fit a nightmare pattern. Last night’s welcome seems a world away.

  After a few minutes the music stops. I slip into an uneasy sleep. An hour later it starts again. I throw back the blankets and look out of the window again. The grey walls stare back.

  At a quarter to eight I’m up, dressed and ready for work when I hear the knock on my door. It’s the film crew, reunited with their equipment and ready to do a quick introductory piece before our supervisors arrive. To my relief, I find I’m not the only one freaked out by the invisible music. The silence of the city is more easily explained. It’s Sunday and early on a Sunday most cities are asleep. Funny where the mind can take you, building up a sinister scenario based on prejudice alone.

  The menace dissipated, we film a piece to camera – a first impression, which rather settles me down – then to breakfast, a longish journey, which involves going down to reception, walking to another lift and riding up to the fourth floor of an adjacent tower. The dining room is surreal: an enormous white chamber of banqueting proportions, lit by a constellation of lights shining from a grid on the ceiling. Size does not necessarily mean abundance. The buffet is thin, we’re limited to one cup of coffee each, and there are only two other guests there.

  At one end of the room is a large painted panel of a lake and a mountain view. I shall see this again, many times. It is Mount Paektu, Korea’s tallest and most sacred mountain, hard up against the Chinese border in the far north of the country. One of the only images to be allowed to share wall space with the Great Leaders.

  We assemble for the day’s filming. This will be the first test of our relationship with Mrs Kim and her team, and already there is a small problem. Neil wants to film me coming out of the hotel and walking to a nearby metro station. There is much discussion among the tourism team. Yong Un, a slim man in his thirties, with dark hair, dark suit and dark eyes, throws troubled glances. Initially it is agreed that I can be filmed leaving the hotel, but for a hundred yards and no further.

  Negotiations are then resumed and a compromise is reached. I can be filmed going out of the hotel, but then there is a part of the street which for some reason is out of bounds. Once beyond that, filming can be resumed. I later learn that a department store is being rebuilt and they were unhappy that the mess of the construction site would reflect badly on the city. Once the store was completed they would have had no problem. An early intimation of just how important appearances are to our hosts.

  I can only hope it’s just a matter of getting used to each other. Like the North–South handshakes on Friday, hosting a Western film crew for a fortnight is something new for everybody.

  Once past the forbidden part of the street, the camera follows me on my way to the nearest metro station, the first stage of my journey to the spiritual heart of the city, Mansu Hill and the monument to the Great Leaders. My immediate impression is of a clean city populated by tidily dressed people in plain, undemonstrative, impersonal outfits. Their clothes are in subdued colours and inexpensive fabrics, but there are the occasional bright anoraks and Western-style backpacks. A woman passes carrying a huge child in a sling in front of her. One thing that is uniform is the discreet party badge that everybody, man or woman, regardless of status, wears on their left-hand side, o
ver the heart. The badges carry the likeness of the two senior, now deceased, Kims – Il Sung and Jong Il – smiling against a backdrop of rippling red flags. These badges are worn by everyone from the age of fourteen upwards, though it doesn’t necessarily denote that they are Party members. Out of a population of some twenty-five million, only two million are full members of the Workers’ Party of Korea. I notice that one of my two designated, on-camera guides, Li Hyon Chol, wears two badges, one on his jacket and one on his shirt in case he has to take his jacket off.

  There are almost no private cars on the streets but there is a wide range of public transport including two-car trams, buses and a metro system. The Pyongyang metro, which first opened fifty years ago, now consists of seventeen stations. The one we are travelling from is Yonggwang (‘Glory’). Above the entrance there is a large and striking propaganda poster depicting a group of idealised citizens – an architect, a soldier, a farmer and a worker with a book held aloft – surging forward, their eyes on some distant socialist horizon.

  I have seen no consumer advertising at all. Only ideas are sold here. I go down the broad steps, have my ticket checked by an impassive lady, and step onto the escalator. So far no one has taken a blind bit of notice of us.

  It’s a long way down to the station platforms. Nick tells me that the reason for this is that the stations were also designed to serve as bomb shelters, though none of our minders will confirm that. But there’s certainly nothing drab or functional about them.