Everybody knows the Berlin Wall – but have you heard of the Korean Wall before?
According to North Korea the wall is 240 kilometers long, 5 to 8 meters high and packed with soil form the southern side (so it can be accessed by vehicles / military personnel) and it is completely invisible from South Korea. The United States and South Korea claim that the wall does not exist… but the DPRK is more than happy to show it to tourists.
We left the *JSA via the DMZ* and headed to the countryside; most likely northeast, probably for an hour. I tried to pin down the exact location of where we went to, but I failed. There are military posts on both sides of the DMZ every couple of hundred meters and it’s close to impossible to figure out with one we visited, so please consider the mark on the map a more or less wild guess.
Our driver parked the bus directly next to a small manned outpost and from there we went up a hill through a narrow trench like passage. Up there we found a rather flat building, partly hidden into the mountain, although the southern side very well knows what’s going on there…
What was going on? Well, a retired Colonel of the Korean People’s Army asked us to take a seat in surprisingly comfy chairs and told us all about the Korean Wall. How big it is, when it was built (between 1977 and 1979) and that it is slightly shorter than the DMZ, since there are openings at border crossings and at the Joint Security Area.
Afterwards we went outside to have a look ourselves. Sadly it was an overcast day and the visibility was everything but good, although the South Korean fortifications were less than 4 kilometers away. Even with the help of the ready to use binoculars and rather big zoom lenses it was impossible to clearly recognize the wall. The visible South Korean outposts were all on top of a mountain range and it looked like there was a wall or two below – whether it was a 240 kilometer long wall to separate the country or just a small construction to support the slope is hard to tell…
(Please *click here to get to Abandoned Kansai’s North Korea Special* and *here for a map about the tour at GoogleMaps*. If you don’t want to miss the latest article you can *follow Abandoned Kansai on Twitter* and *like this blog on Facebook* – and of course there is the *video channel on Youtube*…)
Now this is interesting…and bizarre at the same time. I had not heard of the wall before, would have been great to have heard a general talk about this.
It was quite a surreal place actually, but the colonel was super-friendly. It should be a standard place to visit for most tours now.
Did you visit the DMZ from North Korea site? It is interesting because South Korean cannot go there. I wish we could be united soon.
Yeah, I’ve visited the DMZ from the northern side. South Korea and the States say the Korean Wall is a lie, but I am not so sure…
I haven’t heard about the Korean wall. It is my first time. I need to google a bit. lol 🙂
It might be true because it was written to be built between 1977 and 1979, and we were under Park Jeonghee’s military dictatorship. That time was really anti socialism and so North Korea and even the media was not free to publish something, it would be easy to hide what politicians and military did those times.
Korea will be a wonderland for historians once both parts reunited – there are so many things unclear! The communist states believe what the DPRK, China and Russia say, the democratic states believe what America and the ROK say. In the next article I will write a little bit about the Korean War as it is still unclear whether the United States were using biological warfare or not… knowledge they got from the Japanese after granting some scientists immunity instead of executing them.
I am not sure about the biological warfare, but there seems to be a kind of secret treaty between MacAthur and Japan generally because Japanese king didn’t take the responsibility for it and the country itself didn’t pay for compensation heavily unlike Germany. And after that, the American army base was built in Yokohama to contain Russia and China. So in the same vein, it(biological warfare) would be so likely to happen. And I think it somehow contributes to the distortion of history which is committing by Japan. Well, Asian history is just getting more complicated. I think it is somehow related to shame culture generally because once they accepted what they did in the past, it would be too shameful for family and country whatever. Well, maybe we could talk about it more in detail someday. I am also quite interested in history, so. Ok, hope you could manage your articles well and wish I could see your fair point of view about it. Good luck 🙂
Hey Kyo,
There is actually a movie by Peter Webber (“Girl With A Pearl Earring”, “Hannibal Rising”) about MacArthur and Hirohito – it is called “Emperor” and stars Tommy Lee Jones and Matthew Fox. It will be released in Japan next week, but it doesn’t seem to be an international success…
I think Japan made a lot of mistakes after WW2 – and they continue to make them; Germany on the other hand took responsibility. That’s why there is a united Europe and lots of distrust in Asia…
i was there in 1982….fashion deigner….took a daytrip to see the dmz line….they had a ” train to nowhere” pointed towards the north.
I’ve seen photos of a super modern station – probably built for when trains were actually running a couple of years ago?
The onei saw was an antique locomotive…
I really have to go there myself to have a look at “the other side”…
There used to be railway between North and South before Korean war, and it would be blown up during the war if my memory is right. So after that, it was neglected, maybe when president Kim Daejung supported Sunshine policy, it had been rebuilt in the newest one as well as overhauled the line generally for maybe preparing reunification, I think. It is a kind of symbolic gesture.
Hey Kyo,
I thought the repaired train connection actually worked for a couple of years – but I am not an expert on Korean history / politics. I hope the Sunshine Policy will pick up again soon, so Korean can be a reunited and strong country, like Germany.
National Public Radio did a segment on the Korean Wall. North says it’s there south says it isn’t. North says wall is built against mountains can’t be seen from the south, only from the north. It appears that there are stretches of wall at some places, but no wall extending across the whole peninsula. Can’t see a wall with Google map, no mountain range extending across whole peninsula.