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More reviews by Paul French
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Pyongyang: The Hidden History of the North Korean Capital by Chris Springer
Were this slim guide book dealing with just about any other city in the world then it would be unremarkable and mostly a regurgitation of previously published guides. However, CHRIS SPRINGER's book is different -- his subject is Pyongyang, the capital city of the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea -- the DPRK.
North Korea's capital remains one of the least known places on earth. For fifty-five years the government of the DPRK has carefully managed the availability of images and reporting from Pyongyang meaning that for people outside North Korea the city remains unknown. Those images of Pyongyang that do emerge are carefully stage-managed and usually reflect only highly organised processions or parades around ceremonial events. Rarely if ever is the life of the ordinary residents shown. Similarly within the country Pyongyang is shown by state media as the capital of the revolution and so even many North Koreans have little idea of the reality of daily existence in the capital.
Even to those who have some passing familiarity with Pyongyang -- `the Capital of our Revolution' as the regime would have it -- it is virtually impossible to really know the city. Those that visit as tourists have to accept strict itineraries while even those few people -- mostly NGO workers, diplomats and a few others -- who live in Pyongyang as foreigners have their movements restricted. Therefore Springer's guide is not one for the backpacker that turns up in Pyongyang (they don't); rather this book is another in the precious few shafts of light that seek to illuminate something of the life and society of the DPRK.
In that sense this book is almost unique -- a guidebook that is useless to tourists. Few other guidebooks can also contain the common subtitle `Exact Location Unknown'. For many of the sites of Pyongyang Springer has had to rely on hearsay and intelligence agency reports rather than being able to visit.
What the book does do is reinforce the link between Pyongyang's architecture and its political system as well as how architecture and city planning can be used to reinforce historical revisionism. Springer's book is also full of those tit-bits and perhaps apocryphal stories that the small band of Pyongyang watchers collect in the hope they will reveal something deeper about the system. Springer has many of the tales that have been well rehashed -- the reinvention of Kim Il-sung's guerrilla exploits, the myths that have been weaved around the Great Leader and his son Kim Jong-il to boost their twin cults of personality. However, some are less well known such as the fact that Kim Il-sung once attacked Pyongyang Zoo as being `capitalist' for keeping elephants and other foreign animals and instructed that the zoo keep only those animals native to Korea or that the Three-Revolutions Exhibition contains one of the DPRK's first reengineered tractors (based on Soviet designs) that only worked in reverse.
As political fortunes and allegiances have changed in the DPRK so the cityscape has been remoulded. Arch of Triumph Square was once Mao Zedong Square prior to the Sino-Soviet dispute where the North Koreans tried their best to stay neutral and keep the support of both sides while the Soviet Army Statue is listed as a `Vanished Site' -- also removed in the name of historical revisionism. How could a country based on Juche theory (self-reliance) so obviously show gratitude to the USSR or China for its creation? Political inconvenience has long been a problem for the regime in Pyongyang though the Party Founding Museum, as Springer points out, is neither the founding place of the Party, tells the true history of the Party and is somewhat incongruously housed in one of the few remaining examples of Japanese colonial architecture in Pyongyang -- no less than the former Japanese HQ. The not so fascinating Folklore Museum also rewrites Korean history to show agricultural `collectivisation' as normal and traditional while the mammoth national library - the Grad People's Study Hall -- only allows North Korean scholars access to journals and papers less than 15 years old so changes in the partly line cannot be revealed. This use of the cityscape to reinforce the revolution is also evident in street naming and Springer is assiduous in noting changes in names over the decades - Stalin Street, for instance, was changed to Sungri (`Victory') Street in the mid-1970s. De-Stalinisation came late to North Korea.
The need to glorify the revolution and the regime through architecture is naturally a theme of Springer's book. Not only is Kim Il-sung Square (the site of the annual military parade and the `spontaneous' demonstrations against the US) slightly larger than Moscow's Red Square but the Arch of Triumph, a virtual copy of the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, is slightly taller than its French counterpart while the flame topped Tower of the Juche Idea on the banks of the Taedong River is one meter higher than the Washington Monument. None of this, of course, is accidental.
Springer gives over some space quite rightly to the amazing Pyongyang Metro which also shows how the city has been designed as a fortress inspired by the regime's `permanent war' footing since 1953. The Metro, clearly modelled on Moscow's, is deep and cavernous with stations obviously designed to act as bomb shelters in the event of attack; Springer does not note that at the bottom of every escalator you can see the ten inch thick blast doors that can be rolled over to seal the station. Pyongyang's general design of wide boulevards with four or five lanes in each direction (this in a country nearly bereft of private cars) is designed with rapid evacuation in mind.
Springer rightly notes the total devastation of Pyongyang in 1945 and then again in 1953 after sustained American bombing -- an easy equivalent of a Dresden or a Coventry. Naturally the Soviet style predominated in the early rebuilding -- for instance the Moranbong Theatre built in 1946. Springer is also useful in pointing out the precious few truly old buildings left that rarely feature on the highly politicised tours visitors to the DPRK endure. Several of the original gates that surrounded the city are still standing such as the Potong Gate (built 997), the Chilsong Gate (922) and the Chongum Gate (1714).
What were once ubiquitous across Pyongyang and are now nearly all gone are the churches. Springer locates where many once stood in what missionaries described as the `Jerusalem of the East' though none remain. What now exist are more recently built churches such as Pongsu Catholic Church (1988). Christianity, a religion one-sixth of Pyongyang residents once followed (including Kim Il-sung's family), is now underground or incorporated by the state. Services at Pongsu Church, when they occur (invariably when visitors are in town -- there is no full-time priest), feature sermons that are more political than theocratic and most of the new churches are funded by overseas Koreans and also include noodle factories or bakeries maintained by overseas donations. Most of the city's Shinto shrines have also disappeared. Despite this, as Springer notes, at the Tower of Immortality North Koreans are still called upon to `pray for Kim Il-sung's immortality'. Such are the contradictions of the DPRK.
The book would have benefited from some photographs of pre-war Pyongyang to be able to perhaps compare and contrast the former city with today. One can still glimpse occasionally what a potentially beautiful city Pyongyang could have been if you are lucky enough to be allowed to take a stroll along the tree-lined banks of the Taedong River. Additionally some more impressions of Pyongyang at night would have been useful -- it is a most eerie feeling to be in Pyongyang late at night and looks out across a pitch black, virtually silent city with little more than a few neon propaganda signs and the noise of some of East Pyongyang's remaining factories. This in a capital city of over two million people where you can hear a dog barking a mile away.
However, Springer does successfully reveal what to many visitors to Pyongyang is the most surprising facet of the city. Despite industrial collapse, famine and impoverishment the city remains clean, orderly and free of the obvious slums seen in many other Asian cities. He also notes the initial revolutionary impetus that raised the city from the ashes after 1953 and housed an almost totally homeless population. Pyongyang also lacks a dynamism one expects in a major city with the rhythms of street life simply absent in Pyongyang.
Ultimately Springer's book is much more than a guidebook but a valuable insight into the interplay between politics, social development and urban geography in Pyongyang. However, with only around 6,000 tourists a year the book may need the support of Pyongyang watchers more than travelers.
Paul French
12/03/2004
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Paul French is author North Korea: Paranoid Peninsula. He writes regularly on Chinese and North Korean economics and politics for a wide variety of publications. |
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