Destinations known | Why North Korea’s Mount Kumgang resort will be ‘envied by the world’
- North Korean tourist destination Mount Kumgang once symbolised the rapprochement between North and South Korea
- The country has vowed to transform the resort into ‘a modern and all-inclusive international tourist and cultural area’
North Korea is not shy when it comes to hyperbole – its leaders are “supreme”, its missiles are “massive” and its mountains are the most intelligent, having the incredible ability to recognise and respond to significant events, such as when “Glow was seen atop Jong Il Peak for half an hour […] when the nation was shocked by the news of the leader’s demise”, in 2011, according to the state-owned Korean Central News Agency (KCNA).
Overstatement also accompanies recent reports about Mount Kumgang, a North Korean tourist destination that once symbolised rapprochement between North and South Korea but will now be unilaterally developed into “a cultural resort envied by the world”.
On a recent visit to the area, Premier Kim Tok-hun “called for pushing ahead with the development project of turning the Mount Kumgang area into a modern and all-inclusive international tourist and cultural area […] thoroughly maintaining the principle of conveniences and architectural beauty first in the construction so that people can fully enjoy the natural beauty,” reported the Rodong Sinmun, the official newspaper of the Central Committee of the Workers’ Party of Korea, on December 20.
In an apparent dig at the existing resort, which was largely constructed by South Korean company Hyundai Asan, Kim “stressed the need to build the tourist area in our own way in which national character and modernity are combined”. Last year, North Korean leader Kim Jong-un described the facilities as “a hotchpotch with no national character” and likened them to “makeshift tents in a disaster-stricken area or isolation wards” before ordering that they be destroyed.
Just 50km from the demilitarised zone that cleaves the Korean peninsula in two, Kumgang started welcoming tourists from the South in 1998. Over the decade that followed, more than a million South Koreans flowed into the resort, which was operated by Hyundai Asan but staffed by North Koreans. In 2008, though, the fatal shooting of a tourist who had wandered off course led to the suspension of tourism involving visitors from the South.