The Kumsusan Memorial Palace of the Sun (also known as Kumsusan Memorial Palace or Kumsusan Palace of the Sun) was built in 1976 and originally named Kumsusan Assembly Hall, serving as Kim Il-sung’s official residence. Upon his father’s death Kim Jong-il had the gigantic neoclassical building renovated (cost estimates range from 100 million dollars to 900 million dollars!) and turned it into a mausoleum – in 1994, when hundreds of thousands of people were starving the country. After Kim Jong-il’s death in December 2011 the palace was closed for renovations and re-opened exactly one year after on December 17th 2012. (Hence the names Memorial Palace and Palace of the Sun – one of Kim Il-sung’s nicknames was “Sun of the Nation”…)
One great challenge when visiting the DPRK is stepping back from your own social and political views to see and experience places not only from your own perspective, but also from a North Korean one; and there is hardly any place in the country where it is more challenging and rewarding at the same time than at the Kumsusan Memorial Palace. Remember that I wrote in the first article that I most likely will piss off some people over the span of this series? Well, there is a whopping one in three chance that it will be you this time…
But let’s start at the beginning!
The security precautions at the Kumsusan Memorial Palace are putting those at airports to shame. First you have to leave all your belongings either in the bus or at the checkroom within the building – everything but your wallet and tissues; so yes, that includes cameras and even keys! Then you’ll have to go through a metal detector and pass a body check to make sure that you don’t bring in anything else, like pens or chewing gum.
Visitors enter the complex via an underpass and reach the main building using a series of moving walkways and escalators, most walls being decorated with photos and pictures showing the Great Leader and the Dear Leader. Finally you reach a series of rooms that are filled with personal items of Kim Il-sung as well as honors and awards he received from institutions and universities all over the world. Well, communist institutions and universities, which is really interesting in the case of Germany (note: Germany, not East Germany!) as those honors stopped in 1989 – guess why…
In a rather big room you can see Kim Il-sung’s train compartment he used to travel in – not only within Korea, but also to foreign countries. The exact routes and dates are displayed on one of the room’s walls. So the Kumsusan Palace is not only about bling, it’s also about education – and grief.
Centerpiece of the tour is the big man himself, Kim Il-sung – and he really is the centerpiece, like literally! After passing through a dust blowing machine you enter a rather dark room aflame in reddish light. You line up, step forward and turn left – now being at the foot-end of the preserved remains of the Great Leader. 4 to 6 people at the same time step forward again, bow for a couple of seconds and then turn left to go clockwise to the right side of the embalmed body. There you bow again before you continue clockwise 180° to the left side of Kim Il-sung where you bow a third and last time before leaving the room – all under the eyes of four (e)motionless soldiers guarding the remains.
Contrary to Wikipedia you are actually allowed to talk within the palace, but with a soft voice – though the only person talking in the mausoleum room is the guide who hints when it is appropriate to bow and when it is time to move on. Speaking of appropriate: While wearing decent clothing is expected at all time when being in the DPRK it is no problem to wear jeans and T-shirts, even with prints as long as they don’t include flags of or political slogans about certain countries (including the States and South Korea, of course…). At the Kumsusan Palace though people really dress up. (Except for that one group of Russian tourists entering right in front of us…) Korean visitors wear suits, their best uniform or colorful dresses – foreign visitors are expected to at least wear button shirts and ties, if possible a suit jacket and cloth trousers. To meet those requirements I even had to buy a tie in China, as it was the first time in almost 7 years that I was wearing one – and somebody from the group had to tie it for me as I had no idea how to. Since we were visiting the Kumsusan Palace on the first morning of our trip to the DPRK our relationship with the guides was still shaky, luckily everybody played along and afterwards it was overheard that the Korean guides told our Western guide that this was a good group. So if you ever visit the Kumsusan Palace: Dress up, shut up and bow, no matter what you think about the two Kims and their regime!
You can talk about it afterwards as much as you want. And people did, as many felt it was the most surreal situation they’ve ever been in – a statement I wouldn’t sign.
I grew up Catholic and my grandma dragged me to church every Sunday for about four years after First Communion, going irregularly for a while before that event. In middle school I finally had enough of it and went to a friend’s house playing video games before my family even woke up – when you spend an hour at an event you can’t relate to you have plenty of time to question it even more. My grandma didn’t like my “lack of enthusiasm” for Christianity, but accepted it after a while. When one of my sisters married 10 years later it was the first time for me to attend divine service in about 8 years since I even stopped going to church on Christmas and Easter. And boy, THAT was strange. During my church going days I was just bored by the long sermons (German Catholic Masses are nothing like the gospel stuff you see in American movies…) and terribly annoyed by all the contradictions, but I grew up with it, so at least it felt familiar. But after a decade I forgot most of the procedure and if you step back and don’t have a personal connection to a religious service it is really, really strange. No disrespect, but I remember sitting in the cathedral thinking “This is so surreal – it must be how Christians feel like when they see ceremonies of some previously undiscovered tribe!” – I just couldn’t relate at all!
So when we were asked to bow in front of Kim Il-sung’s embalmed body I just though “Whatever, if it makes you happy…” – and that’s it. At least they didn’t give me long boring speeches or expected me to sing! Or said “The Body of Kim” and gave me a consecrated host to eat – now that would have been friggin weird behavior! Bowing in front of a corpse? Pff, I can deal with that…
So dear religious people (in general), I didn’t write the previous paragraphs to offend you – I wrote them to stress how important it is to disconnect yourself and see situations from a different perspective. People visiting the DPRK have to understand that the personality cult about Kim Il-sung, Kim Jong-il and Kim Jong-un in North Korea isn’t that much different from radical religions all over the world (heck, when the Kims punish whole families for three generations they actually act as written in Exodus 20:5!). North Koreans in general aren’t very religious, but to them the Kims have a godlike status – and not respecting any of the three the way they do is borderline blasphemy. Luckily most Christians outgrew the whole blasphemy thing, but for centuries you were basically a dead (wo)man if you said something against the church, thanks to the Old Testament. (“Anyone arrogant enough to reject the verdict of the judge or of the priest who represents the LORD your God must be put to death.” (Deuteronomy 17:12 NLT)). And don’t get me started about the whole Muhammad drawings thing…
Anyway, now that I most likely lost some of my readers by ranting about religions and outing myself as an agnostic atheist let’s wrap up this article. (I am really curious though to find out if and how many people will unsubscribe over that little personal story…)
After leaving Kim Il-sung’s final resting place we basically did the same procedure with a Kim Jong-il setting. Awards and honors, personal items (including a boat and several cars – very interesting: his travel map was a lot more limited due to the fact that there were a lot less communist states from the mid 1990s on when he came to power…), embalmed body; though I am not sure about the order. Embalmed body might have been the second stop on both tours. But does it really matter?
Having seen both Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il (which is rare – it seems like most visitors only get to see one of them each visit) we went back to the checkroom by the opposite set of escalators and travelators to grab our cameras and take some pictures outside. The Kumsusan Palace is surrounded by a nice park and in front of the building is a huge square where soldiers put up hundreds of chairs for some kind of festivity nobody knew what it was about. (Oh, and if you plan a trip to the DPRK avoid the months of May and June as the Kumsusan Palace will be closed – every year.)
Overall the Palace of the Sun was a very impressive place to visit and definitely one of the highlights of the trip, even though it wasn’t the most surreal experience of my life. But since I told you about mine nonetheless, let me ask you – what was the most bizarre situation in your life?
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