Rare Photos from Inside North Korea's 'Hotel of Doom' (2023)
100 comments
·February 17, 2025thih9
aaronbrethorst
Even the 'light show' has an almost Blade Runner-esque retrofuturistic vibe to it: https://www.therpf.com/forums/threads/blade-runner-advertise...
whamlastxmas
Thanks, annoying the article didn’t include photos
lqet
Offtopic, but every time I watch a documentary on North Korea I am happy to see that so much of the old Berlin subway rolling stock seems to lead a nice retirement live there - according to Wikipedia, they use 220 Class D cars from the 50ies and 60ies (132 in active service) in the Pyongyang Metro, and another 120 Class G cars from the 70ies were converted into trains for the Korean State Railway. [0]
lisper
> every time I watch a documentary on North Korea I am happy
There is something deeply wrong with that. It's kind of like saying that every time you watch a documentary on the Holocaust you are happy the fate of the rolling stock that took people to Auschwitz. It is almost literally the same thing.
https://www.vox.com/2014/10/27/7073029/north-korea-gulags-pr...
There is absolutely nothing to be happy about when it comes to North Korea.
pastureofplenty
Did North Korea piss in your cornflakes?
LargoLasskhyfv
What? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryongchon_disaster
Such blast. Much wow!
latentcall
Are you really comparing North Korea to the HOLOCAUST? I can’t even fathom it.
tdeck
US carpet bombing killed 20% of the North Korean population during the Korean war, although I assume that's not what they're referring to.
> “Over a period of three years or so, we killed off — what — 20 percent of the population,” Air Force Gen. Curtis LeMay, head of the Strategic Air Command during the Korean War, told the Office of Air Force History in 1984. Dean Rusk, a supporter of the war and later secretary of state, said the United States bombed “everything that moved in North Korea, every brick standing on top of another.” After running low on urban targets, U.S. bombers destroyed hydroelectric and irrigation dams in the later stages of the war, flooding farmland and destroying crops.
https://www.vox.com/2015/8/3/9089913/north-korea-us-war-crim...
lisper
I cannot fathom that you think this is an inapt comparison. North Korea's raw body count might be slightly lower (though even that is questionable [1]), but in many ways, North Korea is worse than Nazi Germany was. In fact, this is so obvious to me that I am seriously entertaining the possibility that all the hate my comment is getting is coming from DPRK government shills.
[1] https://nationalinterest.org/blog/korea-watch/35-million-dea...
xivzgrev
Anytime I see a picture of North Korea I think
1) is the person now banned? 2) did insiders get punished?
For this one, I worry for those insiders. They made their choice but I can’t imagine Kim is happy this got out.
kstrauser
When I see pictures, I'm always surprised by how relatively normal it looks from a distance. I guess I pictured it more 1984 style, with grey cubed buildings and zero trees, decoration, or anything else pleasant.
From a distance, it seems remarkably normal to me. I have no desire to visit and certainly wouldn't want to live there, but it looks not all that bad.
robotnikman
It could all be an example of a 'Potemkin village' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potemkin_village
qingcharles
Simon has unprecedented access to NK. More than any other Westerner, I think. He's been doing this for so long, without reprisal, that I think he must know where the line is on what he can publicly document.
If you meet him, ask him about the other stuff he can't document... :)
pydry
I went on one of his tours and during the annual military parade I watched him wander all over the route while we watched from one spot.
I caught up and was like "wtf can we do this? they dont mind?"
He told me yea, no problem go wherever you like in the parade just dont do anything stupid. So we did.
He was very clear about when we needed to hold back, but also knew exactly which boundaries could be pushed.
whamlastxmas
The article isn’t exactly hard hitting. It debunks myths that make North Korea look bad, doesn’t talk about how many people died making it, etc
gwern
> Having visited the hermit state around 200 times through working as a tour guide
He's a regime supporter who brings in desperately needed foreign currency to help pay for the nuke & missile program and elite luxuries. Hence, given that he has talked about and posted this, he is almost certainly correct when he says
> Some media has portrayed the idea that North Koreans are embarrassed by the empty hotel or the length of time it took to finish, Cockerell said, "but I never found that to be true"..."That's ludicrous, and never been true. Absolute nonsense. It used to appear on the front of books and magazines, even when it was an incomplete concrete shell with a crane up top. So that's complete rubbish. It was not a cause for embarrassment." Cockerell said the Kim family simply put the blame on America, falsely explaining to the North Korean people that the delays were "the fault of jealous conspiracies" from outside Western powers...Cockerell has also observed how Pyongyang locals interact with the structure. "It's not like people sit on their balconies, watching the slogans go by. It's just part of the nightlife. It's a futuristic building to North Koreans, very modern, unlike anything else."
That is, this post is sort of a quasi 'submarine' for North Korean tourism. 'Come see our unique pyramid, which we think is cool rather than a symptom of totalitarian dictatorship (and pay us a lot of renminbi/dollars/yen)!'
Synaesthesia
There's some kind of cartoonist supervillian picture of North Korea. It's quite surprising when you learn that it's a country filled with ordinary people, doing ordinary things like us.
Yes it's incredibly paranoid and authoritarian, but when you learn the history it makes sense why it is like that.
This is a country that was utterly destroyed by a superpower, who crowed about it, and which still threatens it.
jiggawatts
A much better model is that it is ruled by the Kim family as a dictatorship for the last eighty years. Wars, other countries, and the like are mere sideshows. Sure, they influenced NK’s history, but fundamentally it is a story of autocratic rule more than anything else.
latentcall
At least they get free healthcare!
tempodox
> "There is a kind of North Korean-ness about it," he said.
I take it, monumental effort for close to zero functionality is North-Korean.
itsmartapuntocm
"If you're building a skyscraper out of reinforced concrete, the only way for it to be stable is to design it in the shape of a pyramid."
Except the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur are standard supertalls built out of reinforced concrete?
lqet
But not "standard" reinforced concrete:
> Due to the huge cost of importing steel, the towers were constructed on a cheaper radical design of super high-strength reinforced concrete. High-strength concrete is a material familiar to Asian contractors and twice as effective as steel in sway reduction; however, it makes the building twice as heavy on its foundation as a comparable steel building. Supported by 23-by-23 metre concrete cores and an outer ring of widely spaced super columns, the towers use a sophisticated structural system that accommodates its slender profile and provides 560,000 square metres of column-free office space. [0]
adrian_b
Looking in Wikipedia, they still have a section that diminishes with the height and they are made of some special "super high-strength reinforced concrete".
Even by using this special reinforced concrete, the towers are twice heavier than if they had used a steel structure.
decimalenough
> No doubt a source of pain for the Kim dynasty, the impressive 554m Lotte World Tower in Seoul, South Korea, which was finished in 2017, dwarfs the Ryugyong Hotel.
This is in fact doubly painful, since the whole reason they built the Ryugyong is (apparently) that a South Korean company built what was then the world's tallest hotel in Singapore.
napworth
"Inside". Proceeds to show three photots.
sandworm101
Well, it does say "from" the inside rather than "of" the inside.
napworth
I believe those are the same thing. You tell me you have rare photos from inside the Titan Submersible, I'm going to expect multiple story defining shots from inside. Not just stock photos of the sea.
486sx33
I mean , none of these photos is rare at all…
https://nationalpost.com/news/new-photos-reveal-inside-of-no...
2012
albino_yak
Yeah, they seem to be re-reporting a story from 2012. Here's an archived post from 2012 with the same picture of the same tour guide (Simon Cockerell) at the top of the hotel: https://web.archive.org/web/20141110072645/http://koryogroup...
FabHK
Makes sense. From the article:
> Cockerell began running tours to North Korea with the company Koryo Tours in 2002 ...
> Ten years later, Cockerell met a North Korean who was working in China, and that man had the contacts necessary to arrange a visit.
Though the article has some later information:
> No doubt a source of pain for the Kim dynasty, the impressive 554m Lotte World Tower in Seoul, South Korea, which was finished in 2017, dwarfs the Ryugyong Hotel.
waynecochran
Those are the same internal photos. Where are all of these other photos you allude to?
BucketsMcG
Nothing is rare on the Internet. It's a pet bugbear of mine.
FooBarWidget
It is a term journalists like to use to convey that they're doing important work or that you're reading something valuable. I see them use this kind of language for many things, hoping that readers fall for it.
socksy
I mean I guess compared to photos of the Eiffel tower...
yuvalr1
I wonder what giant shadows this building casts, and how unfortunate it is for those live near it.
m3kw9
Check out that magnificent skyline
m0llusk
Reminder of the developer's maxim: A beautiful building is a fully rented one.
jmyeet
This should be your reminder that economic sanctions really does nothing but starve ordinary people to death while doing nothing to the ruling regime and, in many cases, strengthens support for it as those enacting the sanctions are (with merit) seen as the enemy.
Back in 1996, then UN Ambassador and later Secretry of State was asked about the 500,000 Iraqi children who died due to economic sanctions and she replied "we think the price was worth it" [1].
The next century for the Korean peninsula is going to be interesting. Looming large is the collapse of South Korea. The current fertility rate is the lowest in the world at ~0.71 children per woman. What that means is if you take 50 men and 50 women in 3 generations you have 8 people. We haven't seen anything like this before.
I, too, find NOrth Korea fascinating but what I find more fascinating is how and what we talk about with North Korea and how it's never about the starvation and death we directly cause.
elhudy
Preventing the north korean regime from having the funds to grow its military presence seems like a fair use of economic sanctions to me - sadly, even if there is an economic cost to its people.
matteoraso
I really doubt that worked, given that North Korea does most of its trade with China and Russia, who don't participate in the sanctions. Besides, they already have nukes and the ability to launch them over the ocean. The military presence has grown as much as the regime needs it to with the sanctions, so there's no point to keeping them anymore.
guerrilla
You're not responding to the comment you're trying to reply to. The claim is that it does not actually do that, only starves ordinary people.
elhudy
I thought the context of the previous response was that sanctions do nothing to the regime i.e. in terms of strengthening, weakening, or getting rid of. The North korean dictatorship remains in place so that is agreeable. However, North korean military presence (seen as distinct from the regime presence) has seemingly faltered dramatically.
IncreasePosts
Do sanctions force North Korea to adopt ridiculous internal agricultural policies which leads to frequent famines?
jmyeet
North Korea has roughly the equal third largest standing army in the world. North Korea has nuclear weapons. What exactly have we prevented?
My point is that economic sanctions never work against enemies. They only work against allies. Apartheid South Africa is the example that springs to mind.
Take the economic sanctions against Russia after it's unjustifiable invasion of Ukraine. What have they done exactly? Russia is now basically a war economy. It still has energy exports because there's always a market for that.
elhudy
I don’t get why you’re trying to characterize NKs military as strong when it is objectively not so. The goal for stability in the region is for SK to have a stronger military. If we want to look at whether sancions have progressed that goal, then we would need to evaluate the relative strength of the two since the time sanctions went into place. How large of a standing army they have is not your kpi
josephstalinOk
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yongjik
I'm not sure how to feel about sanctions in general, but when it comes to North Korea, I think the blame firmly lies on its government.
Since the days of president Kim Daejung (1998-2003) every liberal South Korean regime tried to build trust with North Korea, including the controversial Kaesong industrial complex (housing factories owned by South Korean companies inside NK, with NK workers), which North Korea unilaterally shut down in 2013. Railway connections: severed by North Korea. Group tour of mount Kumkang: stopped after a North Korean soldier shot and killed a South Korean tourist who walked into a restricted area.
Basically, every time South Korea tries to give North Korea money in exchange of better relation, North Korea pisses it off, to such a degree that these policies (and their perceived failure) are now regular talking points by conservative South Korean pundits.
At this stage, there's not a lot of things we can try, unless we want to just give NK money and say "Oh please develop more nuclear weapons with this money, we don't care what you do."
callc
The idea that the sanctions ‘we’ (I will treat ‘we’ as the western world) place on NK directly cause NK starvation and death needs an exuberant amount of evidence.
NK literally and figuratively puts guns to the heads of their citizens and kill’s people trying to escape from the country.
NK “government” (quotes since they act like a gang) forces a cult following of Kim Jong-(Il, Un).
NK aligned with USSR and China and tried to out Communism. But like USSR and CCP, the centralization of power into a single leader squashed the good hopes of communism and turned into totalitarianism (absolutely power corrupts absolutely).
How about ‘we’ treat NK as a grown up country that has responsibility for the welfare of its people? “We” are not responsible for the starvation in NK, just like all the how all the villains in movies say “You’re forcing me to do <horrendous act>!” No, really, you’re doing it yourself because you’re insane and care about other things over the lives of people.
rightbyte
The failed military coup in SK changed my view on the country quite a lot. Reading up on their presidents where the legacy seem to be if they are sentenced to death after impeachement or not ...
It is like the cracyness in NK makes people assume SK is sane.
yongjik
Meh, when a South Korean president tries to overthrow its government, we throw his sorry ass in jail. Because we take our constitution seriously.
The same cannot be said for a certain other famous country ...
lupusreal
The only unusual aspect of the failed South Korean coup is the failed part. They've had a crazy number of coups in their short history.
rqtwteye
It's the same with the Cuba sanctions. They have achieved nothing but suffering.
null
zemvpferreira
I feel you on SK and demographics, but 3 generations is still a very long time these days. We're talking close to 200 years before anything like a population collapse.
fernandopj
Only if you count as "people dying and then the next". After a parcel of a population reaches adulthood, another generation is already expected. See the delta between GenX, Millenials, GenZ, and so on. I'd say that scenario is closer to 40 years.
The "coming sooner" problem with such low fertility rate is the bell-curve of your population by age. It starts to center on lower-productivity ages, more medical resources are needed. The system can't sustain itself with a thinner base on age.
dingnuts
if their economic situation is the result of sanctions by the West, why is trade with China insufficient to turn around their economy?
thisislife2
They aren't just sanctioned by the west, there's UN sanctions on NK too. China and Russia are more inclined to abide by UN sanctions than western sanctions. (But this has now changed after the Ukraine war, and both countries do appear to have strengthened military ties with NK).
Moreover, due to the sanctions, NK can't acquire Euros or dollars essential for international trading, and only afford to pay with its own currency. This means that unless there is equal trading between NK and other countries, any trade imbalance in favour of NK would mean the other country would get stuck with a lot of NK's currency in their banks with no real idea what to do with it. That is why China and Russia actually do barter-trading with North Korea (i.e. they mostly exchange goods and services, instead of money, when they trade).
> For several hours each night, the glass façade acts as a giant LED screen to project slogans and short videos to citizens of Pyongyang.
Examples:
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6AkZ2SijQOE
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fo-rXlPr_94