Side comment: North Korea seems to be allowing tourists to take videos fairly freely now, and some of those videos are appearing on YouTube. While the tourists' movements still seem restricted, the videos offer glimpses into life in North Korea I haven't seen before. For example:
Jaka Parker, from what I recall, was a diplomat in North Korea from Indonesia(?) which is why he was able to have greater access to Pyongyang (and beyond?). I don't think he's in North Korea anymore. Nonetheless, his videos are a great resource. And my guess is that tourism to NK in 2026 is from Russian citizens (and maybe Chinese citizens)?
There's also this classic travelog of two railway fans gaijin-smashing their way through a closed route, although it's nearly two decades old: https://vienna-pyongyang.blogspot.com/
Tourism is open only for Russians. It's been closed for the world since COVID.
My friends were there in 2017, and all photos and videos were looked at by a border officer before leaving back then. The border officer could ask you to delete a photo for any reason, including not putting a Kim in the center of the shot.
With NK's population not having freedom of movement, and checkpoints between cities, it's safe to say getting a real picture of how North Koreans really live is hard.
I went there pre-covid and yes they check your camera and tell you which ones to delete. They told me to delete some photos of soldiers. I had transferred photos to an external memory card so didn't matter.
But you're not going to get photos of what life is really like on one of these tours because they take you to places they want you to see.
>Tourism is open only for Russians. It's been closed for the world since COVID.
This is no longer true. They've opened up again in the last year and there's been a small flood of extreme travel of people going.
https://youtu.be/TUmEcL3Feo0
It's so strange that in the age of the internet, we still can't find out how North Koreans live directly from them. It's crazy, but at the same time, it's so fascinating.
My impression is that the tourists are being guided along fixed routes in the limited areas of the country that are open to tourists. But there are long shots of towns and the countryside from trains and buses that can’t have been entirely staged. These are the glimpses of everyday life that I find fascinating.
Yeah, the idea that North Korea is putting on a country-sized Truman Show for the handful of tourists seems a bit bizzare to me. Of course they will keep tourists in the better, richer areas, but at the end of the day it's a real country with over 25 million people. Even if it's poor and totalitarian, like any other country that size it has big cities with an upper class of wealthy elites, it has a class of highly educated scientists who likely have a high standard of living (they produce working ICBMs and nuclear weapons after all).
I feel like due to popular portrayal, many people have an almost cartoon-like view of North Korea as "the dystopian totalitarian state" as it's portrayed in like, 1984 or something, forgetting that it's a real country with 25 million real normal people, and that there are just certain things a country has to do to keep existing.
Even with Russia, everyone understands that Putin exists in a balance with military leaders and oligarchs and has to keep them happy. But with North Korea, people are so caught-up in the one-dimensional view of Kim Jong Un as the supreme leader, that we forget a simple fact: one person cannot manage the entire military and all the industry in a medium-sized country, and inevitably there will be other high-ranking people that have a lot of power and a dictator has to keep them happy to stay in power.
It's still the world's largest prison: most North Koreans would be killed on sight or imprisoned for even attempting to leave (i.e., escape). It also has millions of slaves, in fact the highest rate of modern slavery in the world (approximately the same as the US in 1860 before the Civil War). Kim Jong Un executed his uncle in 2013. Privilege or comfort, where it exists, can be stripped by force from an entire family at once for any reason. So, yes, Kim Jong Un is not a literal god on Earth -- there are balances he must maintain within the country to keep his power. Not every North Korean is a slave. You're not wrong about those things. But I feel your description is coming dangerously close to portraying it as a relatively normal country, which it most certainly is not. It is a prison and slave state, one of the most severe in history, enforced via extreme brutality and shielded by nukes against those who would save its people.
That is not “life in NK”, that is an influencer that has been allows to make propaganda video of parts of capital. Read the actual witness of NK people who managed to escape, it’s one of the worst hells on Earth.
I would guess that people that are driven to risk their life to escape might be the ones that have the worst lifes and/or the most negative opinion on North Korea. There can simultaneously be a somewhat wealthy educated upper class in the capital (which would have little incentive to escape), and a very oppressed lower-class.
North Korea independently developed funcitoning ICBMs and nuclear weapons, you can't do that with uneducated starving peasants who are eating rats.
North Korea has, like all (formerly and currently) communist countries, a decent education system.
An educated population of 20 million people will easily provide you with a several thousand people needed to develop functioning nuclear weapons. Those you need to feed. The rest may, and do, starve.
> I would guess that people that are driven to risk their life to escape might be the ones that have the worst lifes
Generally it is the other way around. The better you live, the more opportunities for escaping you have.
> North Korea independently developed funcitoning ICBMs and nuclear weapons
Maybe because it is not that hard, and it is pretty strong motivator when your only way not to consider rats to be celebratory delicacy is to be exceptionally good at building what The Party wants you to build.
Opened the link just because I've always been mystified by how detailed that region is, and it ended up being a fascinating read. One more reason why OSM is one of my personal 7 Wonders of the Internet.
All 7, ordered by launch date (going off the top of my head, feel free to correct):
snopes.com (1994)
gamefaqs.com (1995)
archive.org (1996)
wikipedia.org (2001)
tvtropes.org (2004)
openstreetmap.org (2004)
github.com (2008)
I really think they encapsulate the best of what I like about the internet. I've been formulating this list for quite some time. Limiting to just 7 keeps things interesting! For example, it's a pity steampowered.com had to be left out but I see it less as a "website" proper. I wonder (ha) how my list differs from everyone else's.
I feel like while IMDb seems like something that'll eventually exist sooner or later, TvTropes is not, thus it is the true marvel of the internet. If it's down, I don't see anyone recreating it (apart from some forks that's mostly archiving the old entries anyway).
IMDb seems to be entirely dead. I would imagine communities of people discussing the amazing details of each movie and giving points of view I didn’t consider and tidbits I didn’t know, but instead it’s … a list of movies, directors and actors, wrapped in megabytes of ads.
I for one am glad they removed that. When I visit a database of information, all I want to see is lists of that information. I dont care what other people think of the thing I am looking up, social media is the place for discussing that.
I'm terrible at making these sort of lists, and I usually find them very debatable, but I'll be damned... I found myself nodding along with every last one of those.
Super interesting read; I especially found this letter from "P791" fascinating:
> Hi, Wonyoung, I map North Korea to help North Koreans.I select areas that look like they might be good points to escape. In particular, the detailed mapping around Phungso-ri (풍서리) is almost entirely my work.I mostly map along the Tumen River, both on the North Korean and Chinese sides. It is important to map the fences, roads, and towns on the Chinese side.
They chose to cross anyway knowing the risks, and it's still preferable to death by firing squad.
"Beyond Utopia" is a harrowing documentary about a South Korean pastor who helps people escape NK, filmed on the trail side by by side with along some actual refugees. It illustrates how complex, dangerous and utterly corrupt the process of getting out is, and also mentions the role of local gangs: they detain refugees and then do a bidding war between the authorities and relatives to extract every penny.
I'm fascinated to read about the motivations of people who do some much great work in places like OpenStreetMap and Wikipedia where it's almost guaranteed that they will get zero recognition (and obviously no money). I wanted to quote what the number 1 contributor (with 75,583 contributions) to the North Korea map said about his motivations:
"Hello Wonyoung,I live in Germany. I also do a lot of mapping here-partly with a GPS-device. I use OSM-maps in my navigation system (OSMand) when i travel.
Mapping is just a private hobby for me. Like others doing Sodoku or Mandala i draw rivers and roads from a satellite image. It just gives a good feeling to relax and contribute at the same time.
Sometimes when i hear the news i wonder if the mentioned places are already mapped and take a look into OSM. Somehow i got stuck in North Korea. There was a blank map. So i could draw big roads and rivers. Here in Germany you only can do details, like junction restrictions or housenumbers.
North Korea is really an interesting country. The political situation beween North- and South-Korea ist also very fascinating and has a lot of similarities to former East- and West-Germany. I live not far away from the former border (Iron Curtain) - on the east side. I have old maps here from cold war time with missing, wrong and falsified data. We dont need wrong maps if we want to live together in peace. Finally militaries always do have their own much more detailed maps.
In North Korea i only use the OSM-aerial images (Bing, DigitalGlobe, etc). Of course i also watch documentaries about North Korea more interested now and i took a look into the Armistice Agreement-maps from 1953. OSM is a great Project. Like Wikipedia it creates free data from all countries, free for everyone!
Im sure one day the maps will also find their way into North Korea. But for now it will help everyone else who is interested in this area anyhow. One example: I found reports from ornithologists researching migrating bird-routes and North Korea is one stop for the birds.
As far as i can see North Korea is mostly mapped by people like me just travelling on the map with their fingers and contribute on interesting things. Nobody is really working systematic or regularly like professional mappers would do. I hope this text helps you. It would be great to get some feedback about the results of your studies. Best regards"
I love how the data is laid out. It's easy to read and shows real care. I expected to lose my current nav when I clicked on an individual response, so I was pleasantly surprised when I didn't.
Really good analysis and storytelling. I wonder what the distribution looks like for joke/troll contributions on OSM and what nations or places get vandalized the most?
Contributor of ~10 years and I have yet to be the first person to notice vandalism, as in, that it's not already been/being tackled. I've been the first to notice various mistakes (big and small), or seen the impact when large parts of the map were messed up in some big attack, and there was one case where I wasn't sure if the person had intentionally broken something or if it was some weird misunderstanding, but they never came back so... not much action to take there. Now, I'm also just a regular contributor and not someone who looks for vandalism specifically; but from my point of view, the distribution of joke/troll contributions to real ones is close to zero (c.q. infinity). Dunno why, I guess most people simply mean well?
I'm also not a big contributor, but I haven't noticed any vandalism in the places where I map (Copenhagen, Denmark and around the west midlands of UK), but I have stumbled upon the occasional edit war where someone will be removing features like their private pond and someone will be reverting their removal.
"Dunno why, I guess most people simply mean well?"
This, but also the bar to contribute is probably too high for the common bored idiot (I know it got way easier, but they apparently don't know). Most of that group likely don't even know at all what OSM is. "Another kind of google maps?"
People are basically good citizens, unless or until they aren't. Something like online vandalism tends to eventuate as a movement, even if a casual or arbitrary one.
I wonder how things have evolved in the last decade as North Korea has tried to evolve quickly at least in Pyongyang and more people inside the country have access to tech than ever before.
Summary: in China, cartography is illegal without approval and a license. The maps that do exist are deliberately wrong. They are obfuscated by technical means, and therefore, by design, there are no accurate extant maps of China.
Maps in China are required to be obfuscated, but the deobfuscation procedure is by now public knowledge (e.g. the Wikipedia article you link to includes it) so there is no shortage of accurate maps. Of course OpenStreetMap never bothered to comply with such restrictions in the first place.
Side comment: North Korea seems to be allowing tourists to take videos fairly freely now, and some of those videos are appearing on YouTube. While the tourists' movements still seem restricted, the videos offer glimpses into life in North Korea I haven't seen before. For example:
https://youtu.be/HQEYB4QWCjM
https://youtu.be/d7m8hZ67Bz0
https://youtu.be/guZQNMEz9as
There are some videos on youtube of the non-tourist-restricted side of NK. https://youtu.be/ZdhSuJ47Zqw
Jaka Parker, from what I recall, was a diplomat in North Korea from Indonesia(?) which is why he was able to have greater access to Pyongyang (and beyond?). I don't think he's in North Korea anymore. Nonetheless, his videos are a great resource. And my guess is that tourism to NK in 2026 is from Russian citizens (and maybe Chinese citizens)?
There's also this classic travelog of two railway fans gaijin-smashing their way through a closed route, although it's nearly two decades old: https://vienna-pyongyang.blogspot.com/
One of the best blog reads ever. Up there with the couple who drove through Congo.
Tourism is open only for Russians. It's been closed for the world since COVID.
My friends were there in 2017, and all photos and videos were looked at by a border officer before leaving back then. The border officer could ask you to delete a photo for any reason, including not putting a Kim in the center of the shot.
With NK's population not having freedom of movement, and checkpoints between cities, it's safe to say getting a real picture of how North Koreans really live is hard.
Was your friend asked to make deletions?
I went there pre-covid and yes they check your camera and tell you which ones to delete. They told me to delete some photos of soldiers. I had transferred photos to an external memory card so didn't matter.
But you're not going to get photos of what life is really like on one of these tours because they take you to places they want you to see.
>Tourism is open only for Russians. It's been closed for the world since COVID.
This is no longer true. They've opened up again in the last year and there's been a small flood of extreme travel of people going. https://youtu.be/TUmEcL3Feo0
It's so strange that in the age of the internet, we still can't find out how North Koreans live directly from them. It's crazy, but at the same time, it's so fascinating.
The first video gives me impression that many of them are ... staged. Sorry if i am incorrect.
My impression is that the tourists are being guided along fixed routes in the limited areas of the country that are open to tourists. But there are long shots of towns and the countryside from trains and buses that can’t have been entirely staged. These are the glimpses of everyday life that I find fascinating.
Yeah, the idea that North Korea is putting on a country-sized Truman Show for the handful of tourists seems a bit bizzare to me. Of course they will keep tourists in the better, richer areas, but at the end of the day it's a real country with over 25 million people. Even if it's poor and totalitarian, like any other country that size it has big cities with an upper class of wealthy elites, it has a class of highly educated scientists who likely have a high standard of living (they produce working ICBMs and nuclear weapons after all).
I feel like due to popular portrayal, many people have an almost cartoon-like view of North Korea as "the dystopian totalitarian state" as it's portrayed in like, 1984 or something, forgetting that it's a real country with 25 million real normal people, and that there are just certain things a country has to do to keep existing.
Even with Russia, everyone understands that Putin exists in a balance with military leaders and oligarchs and has to keep them happy. But with North Korea, people are so caught-up in the one-dimensional view of Kim Jong Un as the supreme leader, that we forget a simple fact: one person cannot manage the entire military and all the industry in a medium-sized country, and inevitably there will be other high-ranking people that have a lot of power and a dictator has to keep them happy to stay in power.
It's still the world's largest prison: most North Koreans would be killed on sight or imprisoned for even attempting to leave (i.e., escape). It also has millions of slaves, in fact the highest rate of modern slavery in the world (approximately the same as the US in 1860 before the Civil War). Kim Jong Un executed his uncle in 2013. Privilege or comfort, where it exists, can be stripped by force from an entire family at once for any reason. So, yes, Kim Jong Un is not a literal god on Earth -- there are balances he must maintain within the country to keep his power. Not every North Korean is a slave. You're not wrong about those things. But I feel your description is coming dangerously close to portraying it as a relatively normal country, which it most certainly is not. It is a prison and slave state, one of the most severe in history, enforced via extreme brutality and shielded by nukes against those who would save its people.
That is not “life in NK”, that is an influencer that has been allows to make propaganda video of parts of capital. Read the actual witness of NK people who managed to escape, it’s one of the worst hells on Earth.
I would guess that people that are driven to risk their life to escape might be the ones that have the worst lifes and/or the most negative opinion on North Korea. There can simultaneously be a somewhat wealthy educated upper class in the capital (which would have little incentive to escape), and a very oppressed lower-class.
North Korea independently developed funcitoning ICBMs and nuclear weapons, you can't do that with uneducated starving peasants who are eating rats.
What a weird take.
North Korea has, like all (formerly and currently) communist countries, a decent education system.
An educated population of 20 million people will easily provide you with a several thousand people needed to develop functioning nuclear weapons. Those you need to feed. The rest may, and do, starve.
> I would guess that people that are driven to risk their life to escape might be the ones that have the worst lifes
Generally it is the other way around. The better you live, the more opportunities for escaping you have.
> North Korea independently developed funcitoning ICBMs and nuclear weapons
Maybe because it is not that hard, and it is pretty strong motivator when your only way not to consider rats to be celebratory delicacy is to be exceptionally good at building what The Party wants you to build.
Opened the link just because I've always been mystified by how detailed that region is, and it ended up being a fascinating read. One more reason why OSM is one of my personal 7 Wonders of the Internet.
What are the other six ones ? :)
All 7, ordered by launch date (going off the top of my head, feel free to correct):
snopes.com (1994)
gamefaqs.com (1995)
archive.org (1996)
wikipedia.org (2001)
tvtropes.org (2004)
openstreetmap.org (2004)
github.com (2008)
I really think they encapsulate the best of what I like about the internet. I've been formulating this list for quite some time. Limiting to just 7 keeps things interesting! For example, it's a pity steampowered.com had to be left out but I see it less as a "website" proper. I wonder (ha) how my list differs from everyone else's.
Interesting! I like most.
I might replace tvtropes with imdb, and while I’ve never used gamefaqs, I’m unsure what to put in its place.
Thanks for this thought exercise.
I feel like while IMDb seems like something that'll eventually exist sooner or later, TvTropes is not, thus it is the true marvel of the internet. If it's down, I don't see anyone recreating it (apart from some forks that's mostly archiving the old entries anyway).
IMDb seems to be entirely dead. I would imagine communities of people discussing the amazing details of each movie and giving points of view I didn’t consider and tidbits I didn’t know, but instead it’s … a list of movies, directors and actors, wrapped in megabytes of ads.
The clue is in the name, its a database not social media.
Despite the name, it used to be a great social website with discussions and lists and so on, until the new owners eventually shut that down.
I for one am glad they removed that. When I visit a database of information, all I want to see is lists of that information. I dont care what other people think of the thing I am looking up, social media is the place for discussing that.
User reviews is 98% of the reason I went on IMDB. For metadata purposes, Wikipedia and other sources are more convenient.
Running a website with comments and "social" elements became much harder the longer time went on, can't really blame them for shutting it down.
It's a badger badger badger badger badger badger
I'm terrible at making these sort of lists, and I usually find them very debatable, but I'll be damned... I found myself nodding along with every last one of those.
Super interesting read; I especially found this letter from "P791" fascinating:
> Hi, Wonyoung, I map North Korea to help North Koreans.I select areas that look like they might be good points to escape. In particular, the detailed mapping around Phungso-ri (풍서리) is almost entirely my work.I mostly map along the Tumen River, both on the North Korean and Chinese sides. It is important to map the fences, roads, and towns on the Chinese side.
Once in China, however, aren't escapees routinely exploited by organized crime?
They chose to cross anyway knowing the risks, and it's still preferable to death by firing squad.
"Beyond Utopia" is a harrowing documentary about a South Korean pastor who helps people escape NK, filmed on the trail side by by side with along some actual refugees. It illustrates how complex, dangerous and utterly corrupt the process of getting out is, and also mentions the role of local gangs: they detain refugees and then do a bidding war between the authorities and relatives to extract every penny.
I'm fascinated to read about the motivations of people who do some much great work in places like OpenStreetMap and Wikipedia where it's almost guaranteed that they will get zero recognition (and obviously no money). I wanted to quote what the number 1 contributor (with 75,583 contributions) to the North Korea map said about his motivations:
"Hello Wonyoung,I live in Germany. I also do a lot of mapping here-partly with a GPS-device. I use OSM-maps in my navigation system (OSMand) when i travel.
Mapping is just a private hobby for me. Like others doing Sodoku or Mandala i draw rivers and roads from a satellite image. It just gives a good feeling to relax and contribute at the same time.
Sometimes when i hear the news i wonder if the mentioned places are already mapped and take a look into OSM. Somehow i got stuck in North Korea. There was a blank map. So i could draw big roads and rivers. Here in Germany you only can do details, like junction restrictions or housenumbers.
North Korea is really an interesting country. The political situation beween North- and South-Korea ist also very fascinating and has a lot of similarities to former East- and West-Germany. I live not far away from the former border (Iron Curtain) - on the east side. I have old maps here from cold war time with missing, wrong and falsified data. We dont need wrong maps if we want to live together in peace. Finally militaries always do have their own much more detailed maps.
In North Korea i only use the OSM-aerial images (Bing, DigitalGlobe, etc). Of course i also watch documentaries about North Korea more interested now and i took a look into the Armistice Agreement-maps from 1953. OSM is a great Project. Like Wikipedia it creates free data from all countries, free for everyone!
Im sure one day the maps will also find their way into North Korea. But for now it will help everyone else who is interested in this area anyhow. One example: I found reports from ornithologists researching migrating bird-routes and North Korea is one stop for the birds.
As far as i can see North Korea is mostly mapped by people like me just travelling on the map with their fingers and contribute on interesting things. Nobody is really working systematic or regularly like professional mappers would do. I hope this text helps you. It would be great to get some feedback about the results of your studies. Best regards"
This is super interesting, but I would vastly prefer a regular article with the relevant illustrations interspersed as static images.
Why are there dates "scrolling" on the right side of the screen for the first few text boxes? Is the map supposed to display something as well?
This looks like it would be cool, but it is quite broken.
For folks who want to get in the weeds of mapping North Korea on OSM, there's some documentation on OSM wiki. [1]
[1] https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Category:North_Korea
> we sent a letter to all of the contributors; here are the responses
love this one:
> Good afternoon. Please provide us a screenshot of these OSM map. Only know "Google Maps". Thank you.
This is a post from 2019
Edits of North Korea: https://osmstats.neis-one.org/?item=countries&country=North%...
Current status: https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=8/39.358/127.321
I love how the data is laid out. It's easy to read and shows real care. I expected to lose my current nav when I clicked on an individual response, so I was pleasantly surprised when I didn't.
Maybe out of scope, but I find the site design here very calming for reading.
Really good analysis and storytelling. I wonder what the distribution looks like for joke/troll contributions on OSM and what nations or places get vandalized the most?
Contributor of ~10 years and I have yet to be the first person to notice vandalism, as in, that it's not already been/being tackled. I've been the first to notice various mistakes (big and small), or seen the impact when large parts of the map were messed up in some big attack, and there was one case where I wasn't sure if the person had intentionally broken something or if it was some weird misunderstanding, but they never came back so... not much action to take there. Now, I'm also just a regular contributor and not someone who looks for vandalism specifically; but from my point of view, the distribution of joke/troll contributions to real ones is close to zero (c.q. infinity). Dunno why, I guess most people simply mean well?
Interesting, thanks for the reply and your contributions. This makes me happy to hear!
I'm also not a big contributor, but I haven't noticed any vandalism in the places where I map (Copenhagen, Denmark and around the west midlands of UK), but I have stumbled upon the occasional edit war where someone will be removing features like their private pond and someone will be reverting their removal.
"Dunno why, I guess most people simply mean well?"
This, but also the bar to contribute is probably too high for the common bored idiot (I know it got way easier, but they apparently don't know). Most of that group likely don't even know at all what OSM is. "Another kind of google maps?"
You can see with Wikipedia how it is when the bar to contribute is lower
People are basically good citizens, unless or until they aren't. Something like online vandalism tends to eventuate as a movement, even if a casual or arbitrary one.
Lovely presentation of the data.
I really liked reading the responses from the contributors, it was surprisingly interesting to read their personal motivations and stories.
Very interesting analysis. There are many documentaries, but this one from a German filmmaker is unique https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IBqeC8ihsO8
Lovely presentation, but I’m not sure what they meant by the last note. It sounds interesting; it’s a shame they didn’t elaborate.
I wonder how things have evolved in the last decade as North Korea has tried to evolve quickly at least in Pyongyang and more people inside the country have access to tech than ever before.
> "* Names have been anonymized for privacy"
I mean it's not exactly hard to go to openstreetmap, search up the place name and get a list of accounts that have edited/created the feature...
It's a blank blue page.
Enable JavaScript in your browser?
It is enabled, but that's the extent to which I'm going to debug someone else's problems.
I see the page but very tedious to read on mobile. Site developers should just keep it simple.
Coincidentally, yesterday I just found this chestnut from "Half as Interesting" in 2019: https://youtu.be/L9Di-UVC-_4?si=kydtb0r5VETKJJOO
Summary: in China, cartography is illegal without approval and a license. The maps that do exist are deliberately wrong. They are obfuscated by technical means, and therefore, by design, there are no accurate extant maps of China.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restrictions_on_geographic_dat...
For comparison: even South Korea! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restrictions_on_geographic_dat...
Maps in China are required to be obfuscated, but the deobfuscation procedure is by now public knowledge (e.g. the Wikipedia article you link to includes it) so there is no shortage of accurate maps. Of course OpenStreetMap never bothered to comply with such restrictions in the first place.
Now do Web Designers of North Korea with a better interface.