The standard line on North Korea is that it's the most sealed country on earth, a black box, a place we only see through the same handful of carefully managed propaganda shots. And then every few years a journalist gets in and files the same dispatch about empty highways and enormous statues. Daniel's been thinking about this differently. He wants to know whether anyone has actually counted the foreigners who've been there since the state was founded in nineteen forty-eight. What nationalities they were. How the numbers have moved over time. Whether any visitor has ever organically met a local, or whether you might be the only foreigner in the country at a given moment. And then he asks about the diplomats, the people who live there year-round, and why we never hear from them.
That last part is the one that snags me. The diplomats are the only foreigners who see the place unscripted, and they've collectively published almost nothing. There's a reason for that, and it's not the obvious one.
So let's start with the counting problem, because the first thing you learn is that nobody really knows.
North Korea does not publish tourism statistics. There's no annual report, no ministry data release, nothing. The numbers that circulate come from three places. South Korean intelligence estimates, which are methodologically opaque. Tour operator disclosures, which cover only their own thin slice. And academic reconstructions, which are often stitching together defector interviews with satellite imagery of border crossings. Every single figure you'll hear is an estimate built on estimates.
And the headline number people throw around is roughly a hundred thousand foreign visitors a year before the pandemic. Which sounds like a lot until you realize almost all of them were Chinese tourists crossing the land border at Dandong.
That's the thing Daniel's question forces you to separate. There are two completely different visitor economies, and conflating them makes every estimate useless. The first is the mass Chinese border trade, a low-margin, high-volume operation where people from Liaoning province take a two or three day package tour to Pyongyang and the DMZ. The second is the tiny Western tour circuit, the one that produces the YouTube videos and the memoirs. Maybe five or six thousand people a year at its peak. Those are different industries, different entry points, different everything.
So when someone says a hundred thousand people visited North Korea, the mental image should be a Chinese tour bus at Dandong, not an American influencer filming the Pyongyang metro.
And the Chinese stream was always invisible to Western media because it wasn't producing content in English. It was producing hard currency for the regime, quietly, through a state-owned travel apparatus. The Western stream was tiny, heavily choreographed, and wildly overrepresented in the public imagination because those are the people who wrote books and made videos.
So let's trace the Chinese side first. Before twenty twenty, Chinese nationals made up something like eighty to ninety percent of all foreign visitors. The crossing at Dandong is a railway bridge over the Yalu River, and on a busy day before the pandemic you'd see trainloads and busloads going over. The tours were cheap, short, and tightly scripted. Pyongyang, the DMZ at Panmunjom, maybe a mass gymnastics performance if one was running. Then back over the bridge.
The scale of that operation is hard to overstate relative to the Western one. Koryo Tours, the biggest Western operator, was sending maybe a couple thousand people a year at its peak. Young Pioneer Tours, the budget option, similar order of magnitude. Uri Tours, smaller. These are boutique operations. The Chinese side was an industrial tourism pipeline.
And the nationality breakdown on the Western side is its own story. Americans were the single largest Western nationality before twenty seventeen. Then Otto Warmbier happened.
Warmbier was the American student arrested in January twenty sixteen for allegedly taking a propaganda poster from his hotel. He was sentenced to fifteen years hard labor, was released in a coma in June twenty seventeen, and died six days later. The US State Department banned US passport holders from traveling to North Korea in September twenty seventeen. That ban remains in effect.
Which means the entire American component of Western tourism went to zero overnight. British, Australian, and Canadian tourists filled some of the gap, but the total Western count never recovered to pre-twenty-seventeen levels. And then the pandemic hit.
North Korea closed its borders in January twenty twenty, earlier and more completely than almost any other country. It didn't reopen to foreign tourists until late twenty twenty-four, and when it did, it was a small number of Russian tourists. As of mid twenty twenty-six, Western tourism has not resumed. The current visitor population is almost entirely Russian and Chinese.
So the trend line is a peak of perhaps a hundred thousand total foreign visitors a year in the mid twenty-tens, a collapse to near zero during the pandemic, and a partial recovery that looks nothing like the old mix. The Western component, the one that produces the stories, is effectively zero right now.
Which brings us to Daniel's question about whether you could be the only foreigner in the country. During the pandemic, there were periods when the only foreigners in North Korea were a handful of diplomats and aid workers. Literally dozens of people. And even before the pandemic, if you were on a Western tour, you were part of a group of ten to twenty people, and you would almost never see another Westerner outside your group. The country is that empty of foreigners.
I remember reading a travel account where the author said the strangest thing about Pyongyang wasn't the propaganda or the monuments. It was the complete absence of other tourists. You'd be in a city of three million people and see nobody who wasn't in your group or assigned to it.
And that's not an accident. The tour system is designed to isolate you. You stay in the Yanggakdo Hotel, a forty-seven story tower on an island in the Taedong River. The island is functionally a quarantine. There's a bridge to the mainland, but you're not crossing it alone. Two guides accompany you at all times. They're not just translators. They're minders whose job is to keep you away from anything unscripted.
So the organic meeting question. Can you actually meet a local? The answer is almost never. The guides steer you away from unplanned interactions. If you try to talk to a shopkeeper or a passerby, the guide intervenes. There are a handful of documented exceptions, a tourist who managed to hand a note to a local, a journalist who slipped away from a group. But these are rare, and there are accounts suggesting the local involved faces consequences. The system is designed to prevent exactly this.
And the locals are also participating in the choreography, willingly or not. The people you see in Pyongyang are the ones authorized to be seen. The woman at the flower shop, the students at the library, the children at the performance. They're not random. They're placed, or at minimum they're from the approved class of residents who live in the capital.
So the tourist experience is a controlled encounter with a curated population. Which makes the diplomat question even more interesting, because diplomats are the one group of foreigners who live there year-round and have some degree of freedom of movement.
This is where the episode turns. Daniel asked whether there's a resident diplomatic corps, and whether any of them have published accounts. The answer to the first is yes, and it's small. North Korea has diplomatic relations with around a hundred and sixty countries, but only about twenty-five have embassies in Pyongyang. The resident diplomatic corps is perhaps twenty to thirty diplomats from a handful of countries.
Twenty-five embassies in a city of three million. That's a smaller diplomatic footprint than some mid-sized European capitals.
And the diplomats are not confined to the Yanggakdo Hotel. They have apartments in a diplomatic compound. They drive their own cars, with diplomatic plates that identify them. They shop in the same markets as North Korean officials. They can walk along the Taedong River. They see the city in a way no tourist ever does.
And yet almost none of them have published accounts. Daniel's instinct is right. The stories we have are from journalists who were there for a week. The people who lived there for two or three years have mostly said nothing.
There's one major exception. John Everard, a former British ambassador to North Korea, published a memoir called Only Beautiful, Please. The title is a reference to the North Korean approach to media, only show the beautiful parts. Everard served in Pyongyang from two thousand six to two thousand eight, and his book describes a city that is simultaneously surreal and mundane. He could walk his dog along the river. He could visit the same restaurants as North Korean officials. But he was always aware of being watched.
And even Everard's account is carefully measured. He's a career diplomat. He's not going to torch his former employer or the bilateral relationship. The book is revealing in its restraint. It tells you what a diplomat can say, which is itself a piece of information.
There are other accounts, scattered and often anonymized. Swedish diplomats have given interviews after leaving. Germany has had an embassy in Pyongyang for decades. But the pattern is the same. The people who lived there longest have said the least.
Sweden is the interesting case. They've had an embassy in Pyongyang since nineteen seventy-five, and they serve as the protecting power for the United States, Canada, and Australia. That means if an American gets arrested in North Korea, the Swedish embassy is the one that shows up. Swedish diplomats have been in and out of that country for fifty years.
The diplomatic corps is a small, tight-knit community. Twenty or thirty people who socialize with each other because they cannot socialize with North Koreans. Not because they're forbidden, exactly, but because the social fabric doesn't permit it. A North Korean official who befriends a foreign diplomat is taking a risk. The relationship is always mediated by the state.
The diplomats are the only foreigners who see the country beyond the tour script, and they've mostly kept what they saw to themselves. The question is why.
The obvious answer is fear. And fear is real. A diplomat who publishes a critical memoir can complicate bilateral relations, can get declared persona non grata, can burn a career. But I think there's something else, and it connects to what we know about the diplomatic experience there.
Which is what?
Boredom. The accounts that do exist, Everard's included, describe a posting that is less terrifying than it is dull. The work is limited. The social circle is tiny. The city shuts down early. The food is repetitive. The coffee is bad. You're not living in a thriller. You're living in a small, strange, provincial city with very little to do.
That's a different picture than the one we're used to. The popular imagination treats North Korea as a place of constant menace, and the diplomats as people living under siege. But the reality might be closer to a bad posting in a boring city, with the added layer of surveillance.
Which doesn't make the surveillance less real. It just means the experience is more mundane than we imagine. And that mundanity might be exactly why so few memoirs exist. A memoir about being bored and watched for two years is hard to sell. It doesn't fit the genre.
The genre wants escapes and horror. The reality is a man walking his dog along the Taedong River and complaining about the vegetables.
That's the gap Daniel's question exposes. We know almost nothing about the inner life of the diplomatic corps in Pyongyang because the people who lived it don't think it's worth writing down. The journalists who parachute in for a week have the incentive to produce something dramatic. The diplomats who spent years there have the opposite incentive, to keep their heads down and their observations to themselves.
The data vacuum has two causes. The state doesn't publish numbers, and the people who could describe the reality don't publish memoirs. What we're left with is a reconstruction from fragments, and the fragments are thin.
Let me put some numbers on how thin. The Western tourist stream, at its peak, was five or six thousand people a year. The number of Westerners who have ever visited North Korea as tourists, cumulatively, since the nineteen nineties when the tours started, is probably under two hundred thousand. Maybe well under. The number of diplomats who have ever served there is a few thousand at most. And the number who have written about it in any detail is maybe a dozen.
The total pool of Western eyewitnesses to North Korea is smaller than the population of a mid-sized town, and the subset who've written about it is smaller than a seminar room.
The Chinese tourists, who vastly outnumber the Westerners, produce almost no written accounts at all, at least not in languages the West reads. They're there for two days, they take photos, they go home. The Chinese-language internet has plenty of North Korea travel content, but it's a different genre, practical and commercial rather than political and dramatic.
Which means the Western understanding of North Korea is built on an extraordinarily thin base of testimony. A few hundred memoirs and articles, a few thousand videos, all produced by people who saw the same scripted version of the country.
The diplomats, who saw the unscripted version, have mostly stayed silent. Which brings us to the question Daniel ended on. If the people who lived there year-round have kept quiet, what does that tell us about the limits of what we can know?
I think it tells us that the country's opacity is not just a matter of borders and censorship. It's also a matter of incentives. The people who know the most have the least reason to talk, and the people who talk the most know the least.
That's the shape of it. The journalist spends a week and writes a book. The diplomat spends two years and writes nothing. The result is a literature about North Korea that is systematically skewed toward the superficial.
Now the borders are reopening, but not to the old mix. Russian tourists started coming in late twenty twenty-four. Chinese tourists are coming back. The Western tourist stream may never return to its pre-twenty-seventeen levels. The era of the North Korean travel memoir may be over.
Which means the future of our knowledge about North Korea is going to look even more like the present. Russian and Chinese visitors, who produce little Western-facing content. A small diplomatic corps that stays quiet. And the same handful of state-produced images.
The country is not completely sealed. It never was. But the openings are narrower than they used to be, and the people who pass through them are less likely to tell us what they saw.
Hilbert: You keep saying the diplomats were quiet because they were afraid.
Or bored. I said bored too.
Hilbert: I worked baggage handling at Beijing Capital Airport in the late nineties. The Air Koryo check-in desk was next to my station. North Korean airline. Only airline I ever saw where they weighed the passengers along with the luggage.
Weighed the passengers.
Hilbert: On a freight scale. You'd step on with your suitcase. The total had to be under some number nobody ever explained. If you were over, you paid cash. And the North Korean diplomats, they were always over. Always. They'd show up with these enormous battered suitcases, the kind that look like they've been through a war, and the airline would weigh them and the bags together, and then the diplomat would open a briefcase and pay the difference in stacks of US hundred-dollar bills. No credit card, no wire. Cash.
That's a detail I've never seen in any account.
Hilbert: They weren't quiet because they were afraid. They were quiet because they were bored. I'd see them in the departure lounge, waiting for the flight to Pyongyang. They'd sit there and complain. About the food. About the coffee. About how you couldn't get fresh vegetables in winter. They talked about Pyongyang like it was a bad posting in a boring city, not a terrifying dictatorship. The terror was background. The complaints were foreground.
The diplomatic corps in Pyongyang is less a group of silent witnesses and more a group of people stuck in an uncomfortable posting, grousing about the produce.
Hilbert: The produce and the coffee. Mostly the coffee. One of them told me he'd started bringing his own beans from Beijing and selling them to the other diplomats at a markup. Said it was the best business he'd ever done.
A coffee arbitrage inside the North Korean diplomatic corps.
Hilbert: The suitcase was full of coffee beans. Not documents, not money. Coffee. He'd fly to Beijing, buy beans, fly back, sell them. That was his posting. That was what he did with his freedom of movement.
That's the thing that doesn't fit the popular image. The diplomats weren't spending their time gathering intelligence or documenting atrocities. They were running a coffee import business.
Hilbert: Complaining about the vegetables. Don't forget the vegetables.
I won't. The vegetables are part of the picture now.
Hilbert: The point is, you said they kept quiet because of fear or professional obligation. But from what I saw, they kept quiet because there was nothing to say. It was a dull job in a dull city with bad food. The surveillance was real, but so was the boredom. And nobody writes a memoir about being bored.
Except that's exactly what a memoir about North Korea would need to be to be accurate.
Hilbert: Maybe. But who wants to read it? People want the horror. They don't want the man complaining about the coffee.
Which is why the literature is skewed. The people who could write the boring truth have no incentive to, and the people with the incentive to write have only seen the scripted surface.
Hilbert: I'm just telling you what I saw at the check-in desk. Stacks of hundreds, battered suitcases, and a lot of complaining about the coffee.
The one thing I'll take from this is the image of the diplomat paying his excess baggage in cash, and what that says about the gap between the North Korea we imagine and the North Korea that actually exists. The country is opaque, but the opacity is not all terror. Some of it is just tedium, and tedium doesn't produce memoirs.
The consequence is that the people who know the most have the least reason to talk, and the people who talk the most know the least. The limits of what we can know about North Korea are not just imposed by the state. They're also imposed by the economics of storytelling.
Which leaves us with the same handful of stories, repeated in different voices, about the same scripted city. The diplomats could correct the record, but they're busy complaining about the vegetables.
The coffee. Never forget the coffee.
Thanks to Hilbert for producing, and for the coffee detail, which I'm going to be thinking about for a while.
This has been My Weird Prompts. If you want to hear more about the strange, closed worlds that exist just out of sight, leave a review and tell us what you think. Or email us at show at my weird prompts dot com.
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