Kim Jong-il was clearly an accomplished character. A photograph I once saw displayed in the North Korean trade mission in Vientiane showed him planting his country's flag on the summit of Everest.
It wasn't that he was the first head of state to conquer the world's highest mountain that impressed me so much as that he appeared to have done it without all the oxygen bottles, cold weather gear and other specialist kit favoured by lesser mountaineers.
Instead, the picture showed him posing atop the 8,848-metre peak, dressed in one of his signature zip-front suits, nonchalantly holding a lit cigarette in one hand, while he flourished North Korea's red-starred flag with the other.
However, it wasn't Kim's unprecedented climbing feats that astonished most analysts, nor his supernatural birth, nor even his miraculous 11 successive holes-in-one in a single round of golf.
No, what really impressed the Pyongyang-gazers was what former United States Central Intelligence Agency analyst Bruce Klinger yesterday described as Kim's 'absolute control' over North Korea's ruling party and its vast military machine. Despite a series of disastrous economic contractions and a calamitous famine said to have killed at least 3 per cent of the population, Kim not only maintained but actually strengthened his grip on North Korea's levers of power.
As an aside, Kim is said to have been obsessed with George Orwell's 1984, taking the book not as a satire of life in 1940s Britain as Orwell intended, but as a serious 'how-to' manual for totalitarian dictators.
The concern now is that this absolute control over North Korea's power structure died along with Kim last Saturday. Yesterday's 3.4 per cent fall in South Korea's stock market, and the 1.1 per cent drop in the South Korean currency, reflect market fears that Kim's anointed successor, his third son Kim Jong-un, is ill-prepared for the job, and lacks his father's established power base and hard-headed attitude to governing.