43 Fun Facts About North Korea

What do the initials DPRK stand for?

Democratic People's Republic of Korea was proclaimed in September 1948, three weeks after the Republic of Korea was declared in the South, and each state claimed to be the rightful government of the whole peninsula.

Which two rivers form North Korea's northern border with China and Russia?

The Yalu (Amnok) and the Tumen mark the Chinese border, and the Tumen's last stretch the Russian one; when UN troops pushed north to the Yalu in late 1950, China crossed it and entered the Korean War.

What is the highest point in North Korea?

Paektu Mountain, a volcano on the Chinese border, blew apart in a vast eruption in 946, leaving the summit caldera that now holds the crater lake known as Heaven Lake.

What kind of terrain makes up about 80 percent of North Korea's land area?

Mountains and uplands leave only about a fifth of the country as plains and lowlands, and it is there, mainly along the west coast, that most North Koreans live.

On which river does Pyongyang stand?

The Taedong carried the American merchant ship General Sherman almost to Pyongyang in 1866, where Koreans burned it and killed its crew; Kim Il Sung later claimed his great-grandfather had joined the attack.

Along which line of latitude was Korea divided into Soviet and American occupation zones in 1945?

The 38th parallel was picked in a late-night Washington meeting on 10–11 August 1945 by officers including Dean Rusk, a future Secretary of State, working from a map and consulting no Koreans.

Which city did North Korean troops capture just three days after invading the South in June 1950?

Seoul fell on 28 June 1950 and went on to change hands four times in nine months: retaken by UN forces that September, lost again in January 1951 and recaptured two months later.

How did the Korean War end on 27 July 1953?

With an armistice but no peace treaty, the two Koreas remain technically at war; South Korea never even signed the 1953 truce, because President Syngman Rhee refused to accept a divided country.

Which Soviet leader's de-Stalinisation policies did Kim Il Sung denounce as 'revisionist'?

Nikita Khrushchev's de-Stalinisation after 1956 was branded 'revisionist' by Kim Il Sung, who that year purged the pro-Soviet and pro-Chinese factions in the August Faction Incident.

What is the name of Kim Il Sung's philosophy of self-reliance that became North Korea's state ideology?

Juche was first presented as a 'creative application' of Marxism-Leninism but had eclipsed it as the regime's creed by the 1970s; the 170-metre Juche Tower in Pyongyang celebrates it.

What was the 'military first' policy introduced by Kim Jong Il called?

Songun, 'military first', gave the Korean People's Army first claim on the state's resources; Kim Jong Il adopted it after his father's death in 1994, just as the famine of the 1990s was taking hold.

Four years after Kim Il Sung's death, North Korea's 1998 constitution gave him which title, which no successor may hold?

Eternal President is the title the 1998 constitution reserved for Kim Il Sung, abolishing the presidency for the living; his son had observed three years of official mourning before taking the party leadership in 1997.

What name did North Korea give to the famine of the mid-1990s?

The Arduous March was the state's own phrase for a famine that struck after the Soviet Union's collapse cut off the aid North Korea depended on; estimates of the dead run from hundreds of thousands into the millions.

Kim Jong Il's eldest son was caught entering Japan on a forged passport in 2001 to visit which attraction?

Tokyo Disneyland was where Kim Jong Nam said he was heading when Japan detained and deported him; he was widely thought to have lost his place as heir over the embarrassment, and Kim Jong Un later took power.

Which decades-old North Korean goal did Kim Jong Un formally abandon at the end of 2023?

Reunification with South Korea was dropped when Kim Jong Un declared the two Koreas 'two hostile states'; weeks later Pyongyang demolished the Arch of Reunification, opened under his father in 2001.

Which organisation is the sole ruling political force in North Korea?

The Workers' Party sets a writing brush beside the hammer and sickle on its emblem, standing for intellectuals alongside workers and peasants; it took the name when the northern communists merged with another party after liberation.

What is the name of North Korea's highest state organ, its nominal legislature?

The Supreme People's Assembly is called the highest organ of state power, yet it normally sits for only a few days a year and its deputies are elected unopposed from a single approved list.

Kim Il Sung's birthday, 15 April, is a public holiday known as what?

The Day of the Sun plays on his name: born Kim Song Ju, he took the nom de guerre Il Sung, usually glossed as 'become the sun', while a guerrilla in the 1930s.

What is Songbun?

Songbun is a class system based on assessed loyalty, judged on a family's background up to three generations back; it governs access to education, jobs and party membership.

What is North Korea's currency?

The won was revalued at the end of 2009 to rein in private markets: households could swap only a limited sum of old notes, which wiped out many families' savings and provoked rare public protests.

Which North Korean border city hosted an industrial park where South Korean firms employed northern workers from 2004 to 2016?

Kaesong's factories employed tens of thousands of North Koreans for more than 120 southern firms until the South withdrew in February 2016, saying the wages were helping to fund the North's nuclear programme.

North Korea's Red Star operating system once mimicked Windows, but its version 3.0 was restyled to resemble which rival?

Apple's Mac OS X was the model for Red Star 3.0, right down to a dock along the bottom of the screen; the makeover came to light in 2014 through a visiting lecturer who had taught computer science in Pyongyang.

Which 2014 comedy about a plot to kill Kim Jong Un was pulled from most cinemas after hackers attacked its studio?

The Interview, with Seth Rogen and James Franco, lost its wide release when the hackers threatened cinemas; Sony put it out online and in a few hundred independent theatres, and the FBI blamed North Korea.

Which Pyongyang spectacle set a Guinness record in 2007 with just over 100,000 participants?

The Arirang Mass Games pair tens of thousands of gymnasts with a living backdrop: schoolchildren filling one stand flip books of coloured cards in unison to form giant animated pictures.

Which team did North Korea famously beat 1-0 at the 1966 World Cup?

Pak Doo-ik's goal beat Italy 1-0 at Middlesbrough in 1966, sending North Korea into a quarter-final they lost 5-3 to Portugal after leading 3-0.

What is the nickname of North Korea's national football team?

Chollima is a mythical horse said to cover a thousand ri in a day; Kim Il Sung borrowed its name in the 1950s for the Chollima Movement, a drive to rebuild the war-ruined economy at breakneck speed.

Which former NBA star visited North Korea in 2013 to help train its basketball team after befriending Kim Jong Un?

Dennis Rodman first went to Pyongyang in February 2013 with a Vice crew to stage exhibition games, struck up a friendship with Kim Jong Un, and came back that December to help train the national team.

The North Korean film Pulgasari, made by a kidnapped South Korean director, was modelled on which movie monster's films?

Godzilla veterans came over from Japan to work on Pulgasari, among them the actor who wore the Godzilla suit, who played the new monster too; director Shin Sang-ok, kidnapped on Kim Jong Il's orders, escaped in 1986.

Which news agency opened the first full-time, all-format Western news bureau in Pyongyang in 2012?

The Associated Press team flew in to open the bureau just as Kim Jong Il died, so the launch was put off while the country mourned; it finally opened a few weeks later, in January 2012.

Which 105-storey Pyongyang skyscraper, begun in 1987, has stood for decades without ever opening to guests?

The Ryugyong Hotel stalled in 1992, when the economy crashed after the Soviet Union's collapse; its bare concrete pyramid loomed over Pyongyang for years before glass cladding was finally added.

Which landmark was the model for Pyongyang's 60-metre monument to Kim Il Sung's anti-Japanese resistance?

The Arc de Triomphe in Paris was copied and outdone: Pyongyang's Arch of Triumph, opened for Kim Il Sung's 70th birthday, stands about ten metres taller than the original.

What nickname did missionaries give Pyongyang in the early 20th century for its strong Protestant community?

The Jerusalem of the East was Pyongyang's nickname after the Protestant revival of 1907; Kim Il Sung himself was born nearby into a devout Presbyterian family, before his state's anti-religious drive emptied the churches.

In one telling, the mother of Tan'gun, Korea's mythical founder, began as which animal?

A bear, in that telling, earned human form by staying in a dark cave on garlic and mugwort after the tiger beside her gave up; she bore Tan'gun, whose supposed tomb near Pyongyang was rebuilt as a pyramid in 1994.

Which US Navy spy ship, seized by North Korea in 1968, was later put on show in Pyongyang as a museum?

USS Pueblo's 82 surviving crewmen were freed after eleven months, but the ship never came home; moored in Pyongyang as a museum, it remains on the US Navy's roll of commissioned vessels.

Pyongyang's long, bitterly cold winters are driven by winds blowing from which region?

Siberia sends dry northerly winds across Korea each winter, bringing clear, bitterly cold weather broken by snowstorms; in summer the pattern flips and monsoon winds off the Pacific bring most of the year's rain.

Kim Jong Un reportedly went to school under a false name in which country?

Switzerland schooled several of Kim Jong Il's children; a North Korean boy enrolled under another name as an embassy employee's son attended a state school near Bern from 1998 to 2000 and is believed to have been Kim Jong Un.

Which body admitted both Koreas together in 1991?

The United Nations seated both Koreas on 17 September 1991, once the end of the Cold War meant that no permanent member of the Security Council would block either application.

Kijong-dong, North Korea's 'Peace Village' inside the Demilitarized Zone, is best known for a 160-metre what?

Flagpole rivalry, dubbed the 'flagpole war', explains it: the villages on each side of the border fly giant national flags, and the North's weighs about 270 kg.

What name, shared with Korea's last royal dynasty, does North Korea use for Korea where the South says 'Hanguk'?

Chosŏn, spelt Joseon in the South, was the dynasty that ruled Korea from 1392; the South's Hanguk comes instead from the name of the Korean Empire that succeeded it in 1897.

In which city did the North carry out a 1983 bombing aimed at South Korea's leadership?

Rangoon's Martyrs' Mausoleum was bombed as South Korea's delegation gathered there; 21 people died, among them four cabinet ministers, but President Chun Doo-hwan, held up in traffic, had not yet arrived.

What does the regime call the Kim family's ruling lineage?

The Mount Paektu Bloodline ties the Kims to the revered peak where official biographies say Kim Jong Il was born in 1942; historians outside the country place his birth a year earlier in the Soviet Union.

Which South Korean president launched the Sunshine Policy toward the North in 1998?

Kim Dae-jung launched the Sunshine Policy on taking office in 1998; it culminated in the June 2000 Pyongyang summit with Kim Jong Il and won him that year's Nobel Peace Prize.

Which script has North Korea kept out of its newspapers and books since 1949, printing in the Korean alphabet alone?

Chinese characters were branded symbols of 'flunkeyism' and purged from print; the 1966 standard, Munhwaŏ or 'cultured language', went on to strip out many Chinese and Western loanwords too.