Ryugyong Hotel: North Korea’s Hotel of Doom,Ryugyong Hotel

                                        

                                     Ryugyong Hotel

                                  

Ryugyong Hotel: North Korea’s Hotel of Doom

It’s been called the ugliest building inthe world. Looming over the heart of Pyongyang, the RyugyongHotel looks like a cross between an ancient pyramid and a retro spaceship. Standing at 330m tall, this concrete behemothdwarfs the surrounding apartment blocks. At the time it was built, the Ryugyong wasintended to be the tallest hotel in the world, a 99 floor skyscraper that would project NorthKorean might to the very edges of the Earth. But that never happened. Instead, work ground to a halt in 1992, leavingonly a desolate skeleton. The nickname the Western press gave this unfinishedeyesore:

     

The Hotel of Doom. But what caused this grand project to go awry? What unknown calamity turned this socialistdream into so much abandoned concrete? The answer to that question is even darkerthan you’re probably expecting. Today, Geographics is exploring the tallestunoccupied building in the entire world… and uncovering the forgotten tragedy thatturned this one-time hotel into a silent tomb. Sibling RivalryPicture the scene: it’s 1986. In America, nearly 7 million people are joininghands trying to make a chain across the country. In Europe, Chernobyl is spewing radiationlike an atomic kettle. Meanwhile, in Pyongyang, Kim il-Sung is asupreme leader with a problem. One that’s been haunting his nightmaresfor the best part of half a decade. The North Korean leader is terrified thathis country is falling behind its southern neighbor. For younger viewers, this probably soundslike a “well, duh,” moment.

 Like, North Korea is an impoverished Communisthellhole while South Korea is a modern, capitalist society. But it wasn’t always like this. Less than a decade earlier, in the mid-1970s,the two Koreas had been broadly comparable. Both were dictatorships, both relied on foreignbackers to survive, and both had similarly-sized economies. But then the 1980s had dawned, and North Korea’sKim il-Sung had watched in horror as South Korea strapped rocket boosters to its economy. In 1981, Seoul had even won the right to hostthe 1988 Summer Olympics. In 1986, South Korean builders working inSingapore had constructed the world’s tallest hotel. Frankly, the achievements of the South werestarting to make Kim’s socialist utopia look like hicksville. Kim needed a plan. Something he could do that would upstage theSouth, and show the entire world that Pyongyang was where it was at. Ensconced in his Hermit Kingdom, the supremeleader at last hit upon an idea. Why not beat the South at their own game? That same year, 1986, Pyongyang announcedtwo things sure to outdo even the Olympic Games and the world’s tallest hotel. In three years, North Korea would hold itsown Olympics. Oh, and all the participants would stay ina newly-built hotel even bigger than the South Korean one.

                                                  

 As plans go, this was practically up therewith sabotaging your ex’s wedding by holding your own, even bigger wedding just down theroad. But hey, that’s just how things roll ina dictatorship. What were people gonna do? Tell Kim no? Ground broke on the Ryugyong hotel in 1987,with the aim of being finished in time for 1989. The plans were insane. The Ryugyong would stand at 300m, with threethousand rooms, and between five and seven rotating restaurants. It was built to last, too, forged purely fromdurable concrete. This is one explanation for why the hotellooks like a pyramid, to make sure the weight of all that concrete was distributed overa wide area. But there’s another explanation, too. By the mid-1980s, Kim was already preparingthe way for his son, Kim Jong-il - and yes, there are gonna be a lot of Kim’s poppingup in this video - to become the next leader. An integral part of the younger Kim’s mythwas that he was born on the storied Mount Paektu. What better way to remind the party faithfulin Pyongyang than by building a giant mountain to watch over them? The same year work began, Kim decreed theRyugyong would be a special zone, somewhere vices like gambling and capitalism would beallowed. This was part of Kim’s plan to attract over$200 million in Western investment. 

 

He even envisaged Japanese tour groups stayingin the hotel and never having to leave its vast premises. Little did Kim the elder know, but none ofhis grand dreams would come to pass. In just five short years, the Ryugyong wouldbecome not a symbol of North Korean success… …But of its sudden decline. One Last, Shining MomentIf you’d taken a tour of Pyongyang in 1989, you might have thought you were visiting aboom city. As Kim’s World Festival of Youth and Studentsapproached, the regime was splurging money on refitting the capital. New roads were opening, a new stadium wasbeing built, the airport modernized. And above it all, looking serenely down onthe millions of people below, was the half-finished outline of the world’s tallest hotel. Yep, half-finished. In a sign of things to come, the hotel hadmissed its 1989 deadline. But that wasn’t a problem.

 

 The government had just pushed the deadlineback to 1992, and pretended that had been the plan all along. Once again, this was a dictatorship. Who was gonna disagree? On July 1, 1989, the world descended on Pyongyangfor the not-Olympic games. And we mean the world. Over 175 countries were represented, includingthe USA. If that sounds unlikely, well, hey, so doeseveryone flocking to the 1936 Olympics in Nazi Germany. For the next week, Kim il-Sung smiled beatificallydown on the 22,000 athletes competing in his capital. This was North Korea at its best, glisteningin the summer sun; the pinnacle of Communism. We can only hope Kim savored that shiningmoment. It’s likely that that one week in July,1989, was the last time the sun ever shone on Pyongyang. OK, let’s fast forward two years now, to1991. Already, the triumphal vibe from that 1989summer is gone, replaced by gray foreboding. On the horizon, the Ryugyong remains unfinished,work proceeding at a crawl. The foreign investment Kim had predicted hadnever shown up. To make up for the shortfall, he’d plowedas much as 2 percent of the country’s GDP into the hotel annually. And this was a problem, because the North’seconomy was already close to collapse. Not five months after Kim’s shining summerin 1989, the Berlin Wall had fallen with a crash felt across the world. Over the next two years, Communism had collapsedin Europe, the USSR had dismantled itself, and the Kremlin’s subsidies to Pyongyanghad dried up. Without those subsidies, the dream of theRyugyong was doomed to die.

 In 1992, in the face of a flatlining economy,Kim finally pulled the plug on the world’s tallest hotel. Work stopped. Although it had reached its full height of300m, the Ryugyong had never been covered. And now it wouldn’t be. As the workers trooped out for the last time,they left behind a lifeless tomb, a dead hotel overlooking a financially broken city. The only sign of Kim’s grand dream thatremained was a rusting yellow crane abandoned at the very top of the Ryugyong’s pyramid. It would remain there for the next sixteenyears. In the uneasy atmosphere of 1992, no-one inPyongyang could’ve known it, but those sixteen years would bring their country to its knees. A Taste of ArmageddonIn the following years, the Ryugyong would come to symbolize the catastrophe engulfingNorth Korea - a crisis brought on by hubris, mismanagement, and incompetence. A crisis known to the West as the North KoreanFamine. But before we can get to the chilling partof today’s story, we need to back up a little and explain how it happened. How the triumph of July, 1989 could turn tothe unspeakable horror of the mid-1990s. To do that, we need to go back to the verybirth of North Korea. The Hermit Kingdom arose from the ashes ofthe Second World War. Annexed into Imperial Japan in 1910, the Koreanpeninsula was divided in WWII’s endgame after joint invasions from the Soviets andthe Americans.

 The Americans occupied the south, while theSoviets occupied the north. When it came time for the occupation to end,in 1948, both Koreas declared themselves independent. But neither was really a viable nation yet. Both relied on handouts from their patronsto keep afloat. In the North, this mainly took the form offood subsidies. When the Koreas had divided, the South hadtaken all the good arable land, while the North had been left with a load of rocky fieldsyou could grow, like, one turnip in. But hey, this wasn’t a problem so long asthe USSR’s subsidies kept on rolling in. The only trouble was, Kim wasn’t totallysure they would. Not long after North Korea became a Communiststate, China had also gone Communist. But rather than being all like “sweet, twoallies!”, Kim was more like “ho boy. We’re screwed.” The problem was that China and the USSR bothwanted to be the leaders of the Socialist world, and all other nations to imitate them. This was fine when Mao was basically a moustache-lessStalin tribute act, but after Stalin died and the USSR started steering in a new direction,it became an issue. 

You know how sometimes your friends have abig bust up and you get caught in the middle, not wanting to take sides? Well, that was Kim in the 1950s. Only instead of being unfriended by Khrushchevon Facebook, he might have vital food imports cut off. No, the only way to avoid a nasty shock inthe future was for North Korea to become completely self-sufficient. But how do you take a country physically incapableof feeding itself, and make it self-supporting? Simple: you lie! In the mid-1950s, Kim unveiled a new guidingphilosophy for his nation. Juche (pronounced JOO-Chay) is hard to explain,as Kim kept changing the exact meaning whenever it suited him, but a core tenet was that ofself-reliance, especially regarding food. Initially, it was really a piece of performanceart. A way for Kim to demonstrate to his internationalbackers that he didn’t really need them. Come the 1980s, though, Kim decided to implementit for real. Peasants were sent out to chop down treesand farm every spare scrap of land. Unfortunately, this led to two catastrophicside-effects. One: widespread soil erosion, which wouldharm harvests for years to come. And two: it convinced the elite that NorthKorea really could go it alone. Key to this last bit were the new fertilizerimports from the USSR. 

They produced massive harvests, so when Kimwent out to tour the new farms, he was all like “damn, we can definitely feed ourselves!” By the time we catch up with our main narrativein 1992, as work has just stopped on the Ryugyong, North Korea was in a very dangerous place. You had an economy nearly flattened buildingthis stupid hotel; an agricultural sector that had overworked the land and was now insteep decline; and a ruling class utterly convinced their nation could feed itself. When the USSR suddenly ceased to exist, takingits fertilizer subsidies with it, the last piece of a very destructive puzzle fell intoplace. Despite Kim’s best-laid plans, his countrywas now heading toward one of the worst catastrophes in a century. The Disaster BeginsIt was July 8, 1994 - exactly five years to the daysince North Korea’s great summer ended - when Kim il-Sung finally died. As he went off to the great mountain in thesky, we can only hope his soul caught one last glimpse of the unfinished Ryugyong andfelt a pang of sadness. 

If he did, it would’ve been just the firsttime in the coming decade that the sight of the hotel moved someone to tears. At the time Kim died, the storm clouds weregathering around North Korea, but the deluge hadn’t yet started. It would fall instead on his son. Kim Jong-il didn’t officially take overthe nation until years after his father’s death. But, unofficially, he held all the power;the responsibility for around 25 million lives. And this was a problem, because Kim the youngerwas even less responsible than Butthead. While Kim il-Sung was at least a veteran who’dfought the Japanese occupiers in WWII, Kim Jong-il was as spoiled, as pampered, and asutterly sadistic as a Roman emperor. He couldn’t manage the economy. He couldn’t even mismanage it like his father,because that would at least require some basic grasp of the how the economy worked in orderto screw it up. This was the guy at the top just as Kim il-Sung’schickens came home to roost. Just as soil erosion, lost fertilizer subsidies,the finances broken by building the Ryugyong, and an obsession with self-reliance all collidedto create one of history’s most-devastating famines. By summer, 1994, there were food shortagesacross the nation.

 In response, the regime coined the cheeryslogan “let’s only eat two meals a day.” Don’t let the word “let’s” fool youinto thinking there was some choice here. The government had complete control of fooddistribution. If they wanted you to only eat two meals aday, that’s all you were gonna get. Yet even this didn’t slow down the growingcrisis. At first, Kim the younger tried to make lemonadesfrom the dessicated lemon husks life had handed him. He allowed food to be rationed on a loyaltybasis. Those who unquestioningly followed the regimegot just enough to live on, those suspected of disloyalty starved to death. But soon there wouldn’t be enough food evenfor this. In 1995, catastrophic flooding ruined whatfew crops were left. Panicked, the regime accused the nation’sfarmers of hoarding crops and reduced their food rations. And so began a cycle of deadly incompetence. Faced with lower rations for the false chargeof hoarding food, North Korea’s farmers started hoarding it for real. This led to many farmers being executed eventhought there was no-one to take their place.

 Those who survived were simply able to bribethe soldiers with some of that hoarded grain. Either way, the meagre crops stayed out thehands of the general population. By the end of 1996, the state had effectivelycollapsed. There was widespread starvation, and populationflight as citizens ran for the safety of China. In Pyongyang, a city only party loyalistswere allowed to live in, people suffered malnutrition so extreme that the skin began to flake fromtheir faces. Throughout the entire famine, only the militarywas able to have anything even approaching a normal diet, a necessary precaution to stopthem rebelling. But there was one exception to all this misery. During the height of the famine, Kim Jong-ilwas having chefs flown in from five star hotels across the world to prepare him the rarestdelicacies. As the dictator filled his belly a holocaustwas unfolding in the villages. Buckle up, because this next section is goingto be grim. “Don’t Sleep Outside”During the height of the North Korean Famine, children fled the starving villages for thecities. Hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands ofmalnourished kids flooded into cities like Chongjin. There, they were forced to sleep out in theopen.

 On streets, in train stations, in parks, anywherethere was room. Before long, these kids started vanishing. Snatched off the street in the dead of night. While most had simply died of hunger or exposure,a small number may have met a much worse fate. According to rumors at the time, childrenwere being abducted by starving people in order to be eaten. We have no way of knowing if this story istrue. North Korea is so closed-off that it’s impossibleto verify anything that happened in these grim years, all we have are whispers fromdefectors. But the mere fact this story exists showsjust how bad things got in the 1990s. The government named the period of famine“the Arduous March,” after a military action Kim il-Sung took against the Japanesein the depths of winter, forcing his soldiers to march on despite the cold. But at least those men had been marching towardsa goal. There was dignity in their suffering. In the Arduous March of the 1990s, those whoclung to their dignity simply didn’t survive. There are tales, some backed up by eyewitnessstatements, of families banishing their elder relatives to die so the children might survive. There are tales, too, of peasants reducedto eating grass. 

Of the frog population nearly going extinctas people turned to eating them. It’s said that infant mortality skyrocketed. That an entire generation of children grewup with the physical and mental defects brought on by extreme malnutrition. Overall, it’s impossible to say what thecost of the Arduous March was. The North Korean government contends 240,000died, but the most common estimate is between 2.5 million and 3.5 million. That’s equivalent to ten percent of theentire population. On a per capita basis, even Mao’s GreatLeap Forward was less horrific. This is why we referred to the Ryugyong asa tomb all the way back in the opening section. It may not have been the only factor, butKim il-Sung’s vanity project had helped devastate the economy, putting the North onthe path to famine. Now, still in its broken, unfinished state,the hotel had become a vast monument to all those dying in the countryside. A reminder of the nameless North Koreans sacrificedon the altar of Kim’s vanity. Finally, in 1996, Pyongyang dropped Juche’sagricultural element and begged the international community for food aid. 

At first, the Western nations dithered. Then they agreed, but funneled the aid throughPyongyang where black marketeers swiped it all and resold it at inflated prices. When the aid agencies came to North Koreain person, the regime cleared all the dead and dying out of Pyongyang. And that’s what the west saw: a city thatwas hungry, but not in the grip of something comparable to Ukraine’s Holodomor. But the Holodomor this was. Out in the countryside, entire villages hadjust faded away. The Arduous March came to an end in 1998. By that time, an entire generation had beentraumatized. In a better world, the Ryugyong would’vebeen left unfinished to mark what had just happened. A monument to those vanished lives. But North Korea is like a backwards elephantin that respect. It excels at forgetting, at covering up. And it wouldn’t be long before the Ryugyongwas covered up in a very literal sense. A Modern BuildingIn 2008, Egypt’s Orascom conglomerate made a surprise announcement.

 They would be building North Korea’s first3G network. As part of their contract, they had agreedto simultaneously finish the Ryugyong’s exterior. This raised more than a few eyebrows. By 2008, North Korea had become an internationalpariah. It had tested its first atomic bomb, and beenbranded part of the “Axis of Evil” by then-president George W. Bush. And now here it was, suddenly determined tofinish a hotel no-one would ever stay in. That same year, Orascom removed the rustingcrane from the hotel’s roof, bringing to an end a sixteen year construction hiatus. Over the next three years, they slowly coveredthe exposed concrete shell in glass, turning what had been a tomb into a sleek skyscraper. Even before they finished, the regime wasalready embracing the change. On May 1, 2009, a spectacular fireworks displaywas launched from the Ryugyong, lighting up the night sky. From airbrushing the hotel out of officialphotos only a few years before, the regime seemed to be actively embracing it; almostlike finishing the hotel could erase the hungry ghosts of the 1990s from history. Not long after Orascom finished the hotel’sexterior, Kim Jong-il finally passed away, and power transferred to Kim Jong-Un. 

Just like his father before him, and his grandfatherbefore that, the newest Kim got right on with working on the hotel. Originally, the plan was to sell it to a luxuryhotel company. In 2013, German group Kempinski even declaredthey would take over the Ryugyong, but that deal quickly fell through. Around the same time, pictures emerged ofthe inside of the structure, as bare and as empty as it had ever been. While the exterior was now done, it lookedlike nothing was gonna happen on the inside. And that’s how things stayed. As the third Kim got into his groove detonatingnukes and oppressing his people, the Ryugyong continued to sit empty, its exterior gleaming,its interior empty and dead; a handy metaphor for the regime it was commissioned by. But it appears that the story of Ryugyongis not yet over. In 2018, LED lights were added to the hotel,allowing it to light up and display waving flags and propaganda to the entire city. At first, the light show was only turned onfor special occasions. By 2019, though, it was lit up most evenings,from 7pm to 10pm. This, in a city where electricity is oftencarefully rationed. 

A sign that the regime has plans for the hotel? With North Korea, who can say? Today, the Ryugyong occupies a strange place,both gleaming and unfinished, useful and utterly useless. It may be that this latest Kim has some grandplan for it. It may be that those international investorswill finally arrive. But don’t count on it. North Korea is a state that has consistentlydefied outside observations, consistently failed to behave like other nations. Where it should have collapsed, it totteredon. Where its people should have overthrown theirleader, they’ve instead remained cowed by him, even as it’s cost them their lives. In such a nation, any prediction we couldpossibly make about the Ryugyong’s fate would be bound to be proven wrong. But that doesn’t mean there’s nothingmore to say. Like Ceaușescu’s palace in Romania, theRyugyong hotel is a luxurious symbol of deprivation, a grand monument to one man’s ego, builteven as his nation starved. Unlike in North Korea, though, Romanians snapped. It December, 1989, they overthrew Ceaușescu’sCommunist government and shot the dictator and his wife against a wall. 

Today, the Palace of the Parliament is usedby the civilian government. No longer just a symbol of oppression, butof a modern state that has cast off the long shadow of Communism. North Korea may still be the Hermit Kingdom,the Ryugyong may still be an empty shell marking the deaths of millions, but things won’tnecessarily stay this way. It could be that the final chapter of theRyugyong’s story has yet to be written. A chapter where it comes to symbolize somethingmore powerful than darkness and despair. A chapter where it comes to symbolize hope.