North Korea

Korea was a single culture and, under the Joseon dynasty, a single kingdom for five centuries before Japan annexed it in 1910 and ruled it harshly until 1945. At Japan's surrender the peninsula was split at the 38th parallel into Soviet and American occupation zones, and in 1948 two rival states formed: the Democratic People's Republic of Korea in the north, under the former anti-Japanese guerrilla Kim Il-sung, and the Republic of Korea in the south.

In June 1950 the North invaded, beginning the Korean War. United Nations and then Chinese armies fought the front back to near the original line, and a 1953 armistice — never replaced by a peace treaty — left the peninsula divided by a fortified Demilitarized Zone, with millions dead, most of them civilians, and the North's cities flattened by bombing.

The DPRK rebuilt with Soviet and Chinese aid and roughly matched the South economically into the 1970s before falling badly behind. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 ended subsidised trade, and a mid-1990s famine known as the "Arduous March" killed hundreds of thousands. The state pursued nuclear weapons across decades, testing a device in 2006 and five more since, drawing successive rounds of sanctions. A burst of diplomacy in 2018–19, including two Trump–Kim summits, collapsed at Hanoi. Since then Kim Jong-un has resumed missile testing, declared the South a hostile separate state, signed a mutual-defence treaty with Russia, and sent North Korean troops to fight for Russia against Ukraine.

Public culture is state culture, built around the cult of the Kim family and the Juche ideology of self-reliance: colossal monuments and murals, the twin bronze statues on Mansu Hill, revolutionary operas and films, the flip-card "Mass Games", and a calendar organised around the leaders' birthdays. Portraits of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il hang in every home and workplace and must be kept spotless.

Beneath the official layer, older Korean traditions persist in muted form — the lunar new year and the Chuseok harvest festival, Korean food and dress, respect for elders — and, increasingly, a hidden counter-culture of smuggled South Korean dramas and music, watched at grave personal risk under laws that can impose the death penalty for distributing foreign content.

Religion is effectively banned outside a handful of showcase churches and temples; in practice the state itself is the object of devotion.

Life is stratified by songbun, a hereditary classification of families as "core", "wavering", or "hostile" according to the judged loyalty of their ancestors. It shapes access to housing, jobs, schooling, the army, and the right to live in Pyongyang, a controlled showcase of wide avenues, monuments, and relatively provisioned residents. The provinces and countryside are far poorer, with unreliable electricity, thin rations, and widespread stunting from chronic malnutrition.

Since the 1990s famine, most households have survived through the jangmadang markets — trading, smuggling, private plots, and small workshops — a grey economy the state tolerates and taxes, while a connected business elite has grown wealthy handling trade with China, the country's economic lifeline.

Movement between provinces requires a permit, there is no open internet or independent media, and neighbourhood units and informers keep watch. The near-total border closure from 2020 to 2023, one of the strictest pandemic lockdowns anywhere, deepened shortages and cut off nearly all trade, aid, and escape.

At its base the food is Korean — rice or maize with kimchi, fermented soybean and chilli seasonings, soups, and pickled vegetables — but shaped by scarcity. Pyongyang is known for raengmyeon, cold buckwheat noodles in a chilled broth, and for rice served under chicken and vegetables.

Famine-era foods remain common: corn noodles, "artificial meat" pressed from the soy left after oil extraction, and dishes of acorn, potato, and foraged greens. Dog-meat soup is eaten, especially in summer. Meat, eggs, cooking oil, and fruit are luxuries for most people, more available in the capital and through the markets.

Taedonggang, a state-brewed beer, is a point of national pride, and soju is the everyday spirit.

Independent travel is impossible, and tourism has been largely suspended since 2020; what guided groups have historically been shown is a curated set. In Pyongyang that means the Mansu Hill statues, the Arch of Triumph, the Juche Tower, Kim Il-sung Square, the deep and chandeliered Metro, the war museum with the captured US spy ship Pueblo, and the palace where the first two leaders lie in state.

Outside the capital, tours have taken in the Demilitarized Zone and the truce village of Panmunjom seen from the north, the old Koryo capital of Kaesong, the Myohyang mountains with their mountainside vault of gifts to the leaders, and the Masikryong ski resort.

In the far north, on the Chinese border, Mount Paektu is a volcano with a deep crater lake, sacred to Koreans on both sides of the divide and woven through the state's founding story. The wider landscape — the Kumgang "Diamond" Mountains near the eastern DMZ, the east-coast beaches, the northern ranges — is genuinely striking but almost entirely closed to outsiders.