It’s been called the ugliest building in
the world.
Looming over the heart of Pyongyang, the Ryugyong
Hotel looks like a cross between an ancient
pyramid and a retro spaceship.
Standing at 330m tall, this concrete behemoth
dwarfs the surrounding apartment blocks.
At the time it was built, the Ryugyong was
intended to be the tallest hotel in the world,
a 99 floor skyscraper that would project North
Korean might to the very edges of the Earth.
But that never happened.
Instead, work ground to a halt in 1992, leaving
only a desolate skeleton.
The nickname the Western press gave this unfinished
eyesore: The Hotel of Doom.
But what caused this grand project to go awry?
What unknown calamity turned this socialist
dream into so much abandoned concrete?
The answer to that question is even darker
than you’re probably expecting.
Today, Geographics is exploring the tallest
unoccupied building in the entire world…
and uncovering the forgotten tragedy that
turned this one-time hotel into a silent tomb.
Sibling Rivalry
Picture the scene: it’s 1986.
In America, nearly 7 million people are joining
hands trying to make a chain across the country.
In Europe, Chernobyl is spewing radiation
like an atomic kettle.
Meanwhile, in Pyongyang, Kim il-Sung is a
supreme leader with a problem.
One that’s been haunting his nightmares
for the best part of half a decade.
The North Korean leader is terrified that
his country is falling behind its southern
neighbor.
For younger viewers, this probably sounds
like a “well, duh,” moment.
Like, North Korea is an impoverished Communist
hellhole 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 foreign
backers to survive, and both had similarly-sized
economies.
But then the 1980s had dawned, and North Korea’s
Kim il-Sung had watched in horror as South
Korea strapped rocket boosters to its economy.
In 1981, Seoul had even won the right to host
the 1988 Summer Olympics.
In 1986, South Korean builders working in
Singapore had constructed the world’s tallest
hotel.
Frankly, the achievements of the South were
starting to make Kim’s socialist utopia
look like hicksville.
Kim needed a plan.
Something he could do that would upstage the
South, and show the entire world that Pyongyang
was where it was at.
Ensconced in his Hermit Kingdom, the supreme
leader at last hit upon an idea.
Why not beat the South at their own game?
That same year, 1986, Pyongyang announced
two things sure to outdo even the Olympic
Games and the world’s tallest hotel.
In three years, North Korea would hold its
own Olympics.
Oh, and all the participants would stay in
a newly-built hotel even bigger than the South
Korean one.
As plans go, this was practically up there
with sabotaging your ex’s wedding by holding
your own, even bigger wedding just down the
road.
But hey, that’s just how things roll in
a 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 three
thousand rooms, and between five and seven
rotating restaurants.
It was built to last, too, forged purely from
durable concrete.
This is one explanation for why the hotel
looks like a pyramid, to make sure the weight
of all that concrete was distributed over
a wide area.
But there’s another explanation, too.
By the mid-1980s, Kim was already preparing
the way for his son, Kim Jong-il - and yes,
there are gonna be a lot of Kim’s popping
up in this video - to become the next leader.
An integral part of the younger Kim’s myth
was that he was born on the storied Mount
Paektu.
What better way to remind the party faithful
in Pyongyang than by building a giant mountain
to watch over them?
The same year work began, Kim decreed the
Ryugyong would be a special zone, somewhere
vices like gambling and capitalism would be
allowed.
This was part of Kim’s plan to attract over
$200 million in Western investment.
He even envisaged Japanese tour groups staying
in the hotel and never having to leave its
vast premises.
Little did Kim the elder know, but none of
his grand dreams would come to pass.
In just five short years, the Ryugyong would
become not a symbol of North Korean success…
…But of its sudden decline.
One Last, Shining Moment
If you’d taken a tour of Pyongyang in 1989,
you might have thought you were visiting a
boom city.
As Kim’s World Festival of Youth and Students
approached, the regime was splurging money
on refitting the capital.
New roads were opening, a new stadium was
being built, the airport modernized.
And above it all, looking serenely down on
the 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 had
missed its 1989 deadline.
But that wasn’t a problem.
The government had just pushed the deadline
back 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 Pyongyang
for the not-Olympic games.
And we mean the world.
Over 175 countries were represented, including
the USA.
If that sounds unlikely, well, hey, so does
everyone flocking to the 1936 Olympics in
Nazi Germany.
For the next week, Kim il-Sung smiled beatifically
down on the 22,000 athletes competing in his
capital.
This was North Korea at its best, glistening
in the summer sun; the pinnacle of Communism.
We can only hope Kim savored that shining
moment.
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, to
1991.
Already, the triumphal vibe from that 1989
summer is gone, replaced by gray foreboding.
On the horizon, the Ryugyong remains unfinished,
work proceeding at a crawl.
The foreign investment Kim had predicted had
never shown up.
To make up for the shortfall, he’d plowed
as much as 2 percent of the country’s GDP
into the hotel annually.
And this was a problem, because the North’s
economy was already close to collapse.
Not five months after Kim’s shining summer
in 1989, the Berlin Wall had fallen with a
crash felt across the world.
Over the next two years, Communism had collapsed
in Europe, the USSR had dismantled itself,
and the Kremlin’s subsidies to Pyongyang
had dried up.
Without those subsidies, the dream of the
Ryugyong 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 of
300m, 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 that
remained was a rusting yellow crane abandoned
at the very top of the Ryugyong’s pyramid.
It would remain there for the next sixteen
years.
In the uneasy atmosphere of 1992, no-one in
Pyongyang could’ve known it, but those sixteen
years would bring their country to its knees.
A Taste of Armageddon
In the following years, the Ryugyong would
come to symbolize the catastrophe engulfing
North Korea - a crisis brought on by hubris,
mismanagement, and incompetence.
A crisis known to the West as the North Korean
Famine.
But before we can get to the chilling part
of today’s story, we need to back up a little
and explain how it happened.
How the triumph of July, 1989 could turn to
the unspeakable horror of the mid-1990s.
To do that, we need to go back to the very
birth of North Korea.
The Hermit Kingdom arose from the ashes of
the Second World War.
Annexed into Imperial Japan in 1910, the Korean
peninsula was divided in WWII’s endgame
after joint invasions from the Soviets and
the Americans.
The Americans occupied the south, while the
Soviets 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 patrons
to keep afloat.
In the North, this mainly took the form of
food subsidies.
When the Koreas had divided, the South had
taken all the good arable land, while the
North had been left with a load of rocky fields
you could grow, like, one turnip in.
But hey, this wasn’t a problem so long as
the USSR’s subsidies kept on rolling in.
The only trouble was, Kim wasn’t totally
sure they would.
Not long after North Korea became a Communist
state, China had also gone Communist.
But rather than being all like “sweet, two
allies!”, Kim was more like “ho boy.
We’re screwed.”
The problem was that China and the USSR both
wanted to be the leaders of the Socialist
world, and all other nations to imitate them.
This was fine when Mao was basically a moustache-less
Stalin 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 a
big 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 Khrushchev
on Facebook, he might have vital food imports
cut off.
No, the only way to avoid a nasty shock in
the future was for North Korea to become completely
self-sufficient.
But how do you take a country physically incapable
of feeding itself, and make it self-supporting?
Simple: you lie!
In the mid-1950s, Kim unveiled a new guiding
philosophy 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 of
self-reliance, especially regarding food.
Initially, it was really a piece of performance
art.
A way for Kim to demonstrate to his international
backers that he didn’t really need them.
Come the 1980s, though, Kim decided to implement
it for real.
Peasants were sent out to chop down trees
and farm every spare scrap of land.
Unfortunately, this led to two catastrophic
side-effects.
One: widespread soil erosion, which would
harm harvests for years to come.
And two: it convinced the elite that North
Korea really could go it alone.
Key to this last bit were the new fertilizer
imports from the USSR.
They produced massive harvests, so when Kim
went 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 narrative
in 1992, as work has just stopped on the Ryugyong,
North Korea was in a very dangerous place.
You had an economy nearly flattened building
this stupid hotel; an agricultural sector
that had overworked the land and was now in
steep decline; and a ruling class utterly
convinced their nation could feed itself.
When the USSR suddenly ceased to exist, taking
its fertilizer subsidies with it, the last
piece of a very destructive puzzle fell into
place.
Despite Kim’s best-laid plans, his country
was now heading toward one of the worst catastrophes
in a century.
The Disaster Begins
It was
July 8, 1994 - exactly five years to the day
since North Korea’s great summer ended - when
Kim il-Sung finally died.
As he went off to the great mountain in the
sky, we can only hope his soul caught one
last glimpse of the unfinished Ryugyong and
felt a pang of sadness.
If he did, it would’ve been just the first
time in the coming decade that the sight of
the hotel moved someone to tears.
At the time Kim died, the storm clouds were
gathering around North Korea, but the deluge
hadn’t yet started.
It would fall instead on his son.
Kim Jong-il didn’t officially take over
the 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 younger
was even less responsible than Butthead.
While Kim il-Sung was at least a veteran who’d
fought the Japanese occupiers in WWII, Kim
Jong-il was as spoiled, as pampered, and as
utterly 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 order
to screw it up.
This was the guy at the top just as Kim il-Sung’s
chickens 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 collided
to create one of history’s most-devastating
famines.
By summer, 1994, there were food shortages
across the nation.
In response, the regime coined the cheery
slogan “let’s only eat two meals a day.”
Don’t let the word “let’s” fool you
into thinking there was some choice here.
The government had complete control of food
distribution.
If they wanted you to only eat two meals a
day, that’s all you were gonna get.
Yet even this didn’t slow down the growing
crisis.
At first, Kim the younger tried to make lemonades
from the dessicated lemon husks life had handed
him.
He allowed food to be rationed on a loyalty
basis.
Those who unquestioningly followed the regime
got just enough to live on, those suspected
of disloyalty starved to death.
But soon there wouldn’t be enough food even
for this.
In 1995, catastrophic flooding ruined what
few crops were left.
Panicked, the regime accused the nation’s
farmers of hoarding crops and reduced their
food rations.
And so began a cycle of deadly incompetence.
Faced with lower rations for the false charge
of hoarding food, North Korea’s farmers
started hoarding it for real.
This led to many farmers being executed even
thought there was no-one to take their place.
Those who survived were simply able to bribe
the soldiers with some of that hoarded grain.
Either way, the meagre crops stayed out the
hands of the general population.
By the end of 1996, the state had effectively
collapsed.
There was widespread starvation, and population
flight as citizens ran for the safety of China.
In Pyongyang, a city only party loyalists
were allowed to live in, people suffered malnutrition
so extreme that the skin began to flake from
their faces.
Throughout the entire famine, only the military
was able to have anything even approaching
a normal diet, a necessary precaution to stop
them rebelling.
But there was one exception to all this misery.
During the height of the famine, Kim Jong-il
was having chefs flown in from five star hotels
across the world to prepare him the rarest
delicacies.
As the dictator filled his belly a holocaust
was unfolding in the villages.
Buckle up, because this next section is going
to be grim.
“Don’t Sleep Outside”
During the height of the North Korean Famine,
children fled the starving villages for the
cities.
Hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of
malnourished kids flooded into cities like
Chongjin.
There, they were forced to sleep out in the
open.
On streets, in train stations, in parks, anywhere
there 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, children
were being abducted by starving people in
order to be eaten.
We have no way of knowing if this story is
true.
North Korea is so closed-off that it’s impossible
to verify anything that happened in these
grim years, all we have are whispers from
defectors.
But the mere fact this story exists shows
just 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 Japanese
in the depths of winter, forcing his soldiers
to march on despite the cold.
But at least those men had been marching towards
a goal.
There was dignity in their suffering.
In the Arduous March of the 1990s, those who
clung to their dignity simply didn’t survive.
There are tales, some backed up by eyewitness
statements, of families banishing their elder
relatives to die so the children might survive.
There are tales, too, of peasants reduced
to eating grass.
Of the frog population nearly going extinct
as people turned to eating them.
It’s said that infant mortality skyrocketed.
That an entire generation of children grew
up with the physical and mental defects brought
on by extreme malnutrition.
Overall, it’s impossible to say what the
cost of the Arduous March was.
The North Korean government contends 240,000
died, but the most common estimate is between
2.5 million and 3.5 million.
That’s equivalent to ten percent of the
entire population.
On a per capita basis, even Mao’s Great
Leap Forward was less horrific.
This is why we referred to the Ryugyong as
a tomb all the way back in the opening section.
It may not have been the only factor, but
Kim il-Sung’s vanity project had helped
devastate the economy, putting the North on
the 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 sacrificed
on the altar of Kim’s vanity.
Finally, in 1996, Pyongyang dropped Juche’s
agricultural element and begged the international
community for food aid.
At first, the Western nations dithered.
Then they agreed, but funneled the aid through
Pyongyang where black marketeers swiped it
all and resold it at inflated prices.
When the aid agencies came to North Korea
in person, the regime cleared all the dead
and dying out of Pyongyang.
And that’s what the west saw: a city that
was hungry, but not in the grip of something
comparable to Ukraine’s Holodomor.
But the Holodomor this was.
Out in the countryside, entire villages had
just faded away.
The Arduous March came to an end in 1998.
By that time, an entire generation had been
traumatized.
In a better world, the Ryugyong would’ve
been left unfinished to mark what had just
happened.
A monument to those vanished lives.
But North Korea is like a backwards elephant
in that respect.
It excels at forgetting, at covering up.
And it wouldn’t be long before the Ryugyong
was covered up in a very literal sense.
A Modern Building
In 2008, Egypt’s Orascom conglomerate made
a surprise announcement.
They would be building North Korea’s first
3G network.
As part of their contract, they had agreed
to simultaneously finish the Ryugyong’s
exterior.
This raised more than a few eyebrows.
By 2008, North Korea had become an international
pariah.
It had tested its first atomic bomb, and been
branded part of the “Axis of Evil” by
then-president George W. Bush.
And now here it was, suddenly determined to
finish a hotel no-one would ever stay in.
That same year, Orascom removed the rusting
crane from the hotel’s roof, bringing to
an end a sixteen year construction hiatus.
Over the next three years, they slowly covered
the exposed concrete shell in glass, turning
what had been a tomb into a sleek skyscraper.
Even before they finished, the regime was
already embracing the change.
On May 1, 2009, a spectacular fireworks display
was launched from the Ryugyong, lighting up
the night sky.
From airbrushing the hotel out of official
photos only a few years before, the regime
seemed to be actively embracing it; almost
like finishing the hotel could erase the hungry
ghosts of the 1990s from history.
Not long after Orascom finished the hotel’s
exterior, Kim Jong-il finally passed away,
and power transferred to Kim Jong-Un.
Just like his father before him, and his grandfather
before that, the newest Kim got right on with
working on the hotel.
Originally, the plan was to sell it to a luxury
hotel company.
In 2013, German group Kempinski even declared
they would take over the Ryugyong, but that
deal quickly fell through.
Around the same time, pictures emerged of
the inside of the structure, as bare and as
empty as it had ever been.
While the exterior was now done, it looked
like nothing was gonna happen on the inside.
And that’s how things stayed.
As the third Kim got into his groove detonating
nukes 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 Ryugyong
is 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 on
for special occasions.
By 2019, though, it was lit up most evenings,
from 7pm to 10pm.
This, in a city where electricity is often
carefully 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 grand
plan for it.
It may be that those international investors
will finally arrive.
But don’t count on it.
North Korea is a state that has consistently
defied outside observations, consistently
failed to behave like other nations.
Where it should have collapsed, it tottered
on.
Where its people should have overthrown their
leader, they’ve instead remained cowed by
him, even as it’s cost them their lives.
In such a nation, any prediction we could
possibly make about the Ryugyong’s fate
would be bound to be proven wrong.
But that doesn’t mean there’s nothing
more to say.
Like Ceaușescu’s palace in Romania, the
Ryugyong hotel is a luxurious symbol of deprivation,
a grand monument to one man’s ego, built
even as his nation starved.
Unlike in North Korea, though, Romanians snapped.
It December, 1989, they overthrew Ceaușescu’s
Communist government and shot the dictator
and his wife against a wall.
Today, the Palace of the Parliament is used
by the civilian government.
No longer just a symbol of oppression, but
of 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’t
necessarily stay this way.
It could be that the final chapter of the
Ryugyong’s story has yet to be written.
A chapter where it comes to symbolize something
more powerful than darkness and despair.
A chapter where it comes to symbolize hope.
