North Korea Trivia
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43 free North Korea trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
This North Korea trivia quiz covers the Democratic People's Republic of Korea from the 38th parallel to the Ryugyong Hotel. It opens with the geography: the two rivers that form the Chinese border, the sacred volcano at the country's highest point, the share of land that is mountain, Pyongyang's winter temperatures and the Taedong River. It then walks through the history in well-established facts: the 1948 founding, the June 1950 invasion, the July 1953 armistice that never became a peace treaty, the 1956 purge, the 1990s famine, the succession from Kim Il Sung to Kim Jong Il to Kim Jong Un, and the December 2023 announcement abandoning reunification. The second half looks at how the country works and what it is known for: Juche and Songun, the Songbun class system, the abolition of taxes in 1974, the won, the Kwangmyong intranet, the fourth-largest army in the world, the Arirang Mass Games and the 114,000-seat Rungrado stadium, the Mansudae art factory, the opera Sea of Blood, the Chollima football team that beat Italy in 1966, Dennis Rodman's basketball trips, and the landmarks of Pyongyang from the Juche Tower to the tallest unoccupied building on Earth. Questions range from easy to expert. Every answer was checked against the Wikipedia articles on North Korea and Pyongyang. If you want the other half of the peninsula, try our South Korea trivia quiz.
30 of 43 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What do the initials DPRK stand for?
Democratic People's Republic of Korea
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.
Q 02Which two rivers form North Korea's northern border with China and Russia?
The Yalu (Amnok) and the Tumen
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.
Q 03What is the highest point in North Korea?
Paektu Mountain
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.
Q 04What kind of terrain makes up about 80 percent of North Korea's land area?
Mountains and uplands
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.
Q 05On which river does Pyongyang stand?
The Taedong
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.
Q 06Along which line of latitude was Korea divided into Soviet and American occupation zones in 1945?
The 38th parallel
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.
Q 07Which city did North Korean troops capture just three days after invading the South in June 1950?
Seoul
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.
Q 08How did the Korean War end on 27 July 1953?
With an armistice but no peace treaty
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.
Q 09Which Soviet leader's de-Stalinisation policies did Kim Il Sung denounce as 'revisionist'?
Nikita Khrushchev
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.
Q 10What is the name of Kim Il Sung's philosophy of self-reliance that became North Korea's state ideology?
Juche
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.
Q 11What was the 'military first' policy introduced by Kim Jong Il called?
Songun
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.
Q 12Four years after Kim Il Sung's death, North Korea's 1998 constitution gave him which title, which no successor may hold?
Eternal President
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.
Q 13What name did North Korea give to the famine of the mid-1990s?
The Arduous March
Q 21Which North Korean border city hosted an industrial park where South Korean firms employed northern workers from 2004 to 2016?
Kaesong
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.
Q 22North 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
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.
Q 23Which 2014 comedy about a plot to kill Kim Jong Un was pulled from most cinemas after hackers attacked its studio?
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.
Q 14Kim Jong Il's eldest son was caught entering Japan on a forged passport in 2001 to visit which attraction?
Tokyo Disneyland
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.
Q 15Which decades-old North Korean goal did Kim Jong Un formally abandon at the end of 2023?
Reunification with South Korea
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.
Q 16Which organisation is the sole ruling political force in North Korea?
The Workers' Party
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.
Q 17What is the name of North Korea's highest state organ, its nominal legislature?
Supreme People's Assembly
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.
Q 18Kim Il Sung's birthday, 15 April, is a public holiday known as what?
The Day of the Sun
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.
Q 19What is Songbun?
A class system based on assessed loyalty
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.
Q 20What is North Korea's currency?
The won
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.
The Interview
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.
Q 24Which Pyongyang spectacle set a Guinness record in 2007 with just over 100,000 participants?
The Arirang Mass Games
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.
Q 25Which team did North Korea famously beat 1-0 at the 1966 World Cup?
Italy
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.
Q 26What is the nickname of North Korea's national football team?
Chollima
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.
Q 27Which former NBA star visited North Korea in 2013 to help train its basketball team after befriending Kim Jong Un?
Dennis Rodman
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.
Q 28The North Korean film Pulgasari, made by a kidnapped South Korean director, was modelled on which movie monster's films?
Godzilla
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.
Q 29Which news agency opened the first full-time, all-format Western news bureau in Pyongyang in 2012?
The Associated Press
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.
Q 30Which 105-storey Pyongyang skyscraper, begun in 1987, has stood for decades without ever opening to guests?
The Ryugyong Hotel
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.