Chongjin

Chongjin was a fishing village on a rocky bay until the early twentieth century. Its deep, ice-free harbour drew attention during the Russo-Japanese War, and the port was opened to trade in 1908; under Japanese rule from 1910 it was developed hard as the outlet for Manchuria and for the mineral wealth of the Hamgyong mountains. Railways were pushed inland, a steel industry was established on the shore, and the population multiplied many times over within a generation, drawing labour from across the peninsula.

The Second World War ended here with fighting: Soviet forces landed at Chongjin in August 1945 in one of the last operations of the Pacific war. In the Korean War the city, as a major industrial target, was bombed and shelled repeatedly from the sea, and much of it was destroyed. Rebuilt in the 1950s and 1960s with Soviet and Eastern Bloc assistance, it became the country's third city and the centre of its iron and steel production, with shipyards, engineering works and a large fishing fleet alongside.

The collapse of Soviet trade in the early 1990s hit Chongjin harder than almost anywhere. Factories lost their inputs, wages and rations stopped, and the famine of the mid-1990s caused very heavy loss of life in North Hamgyong; the province became the main source of people crossing into China, and the accounts they carried out made this city one of the best-documented places in the country. What grew in the vacuum was private trade, and the markets that emerged then, Sunam above all, still underpin daily life.

The north-east has a reputation within the country for being tough, blunt and self-reliant, and Chongjin embodies it. The Hamgyong dialect is markedly different from the Pyongyang standard, the city is far from the capital's privileges, and residents are used to getting by on their own resources. The official culture is the same everywhere — monuments on the main square, flower-laying on the leaders' anniversaries, workplace study sessions and mass mobilisations — but it sits on a much thinner material base than in Pyongyang.

Because of the border with China and the scale of the exodus after the famine, this is also one of the least sealed parts of the country: Chinese goods, phone signals close to the frontier and smuggled foreign films and music have circulated here for decades, with severe penalties attached. The region holds political prison camps described by the UN Commission of Inquiry in 2014, and songbun, the classification of families by political background, shapes life as elsewhere.

Older traditions survive in domestic form — graves visited at the lunar new year and Chuseok, and the seasonal work of kimjang and fish-drying — and Buddhist heritage sites such as the temple on Mount Chilbo are preserved as cultural monuments rather than as active religious communities.

Chongjin is one of the country's largest cities, with a population in the hundreds of thousands, spread along several kilometres of coast in districts built around their factories. Apartment blocks near the plants, older housing in Sunam and fishing settlements on the outskirts make up most of the residential fabric.

The formal economy is heavy industry and the sea: iron and steel, engineering, shipbuilding and repair, coal and ore brought down from mines inland, and a large fishing fleet whose catch is processed and dried locally. Much of that capacity has run below its design level since the 1990s, and household incomes lean heavily on market trade, private workshops and remittances sent by relatives who reached South Korea.

Electricity is intermittent, heating in winter depends on coal and wood, and bicycles and crowded trolleybuses carry people to work. The border closure of 2020 cut the cross-border trade that a great many households had come to rely on, and the north-east has less cushion than the capital when supplies tighten. For all that, the markets remain busy, and Chongjin is often described as one of the most commercially minded cities in the country.

Chongjin eats from the sea. Pollack — myongtae — is the fish of the north-east, caught in winter and dried on racks along the shore until it is stiff and pale, then simmered in soups, steamed with chilli or shredded into side dishes. Squid, crab, sandfish and shellfish come in with the boats, and squid is split and dried in the same way. Clams grilled on the shore are a coastal habit here as on the west coast.

Hamgyong cooking is distinct from the capital's. Its cold noodles are made from potato or sweet-potato starch rather than buckwheat, giving a chewier strand usually served in a spicy dressing rather than a cold broth, and gajami sikhae, flatfish fermented with millet, radish and chilli, is the province's signature preserve. Maize and potatoes were long the staples in a region where rice will not grow easily, and maize noodles and porridge remain common.

Kimchi is made in bulk at kimjang each autumn, with the northern style relying on more salted seafood and less chilli than in the south of the peninsula. Wild greens and mushrooms gathered in the hills are dried for winter. Chinese cooking oil, flour, sweets and drinks brought across the border are ordinary market goods, and soju and beer from Pyongyang breweries are the usual drinks, alongside locally distilled maize spirit.