Hamhung

Hamhung was the seat of the Hamgyong frontier under the Joseon dynasty, and the dynasty's founder Yi Seong-gye came from a military family in this region. He retired to Hamhung after giving up the throne, and the Korean expression for a messenger who never returns — a "Hamhung envoy" — comes from the story of the emissaries his son sent to bring him back to the capital. The city kept a royal villa and shrines associated with him, and grew as a garrison and market town on the road north.

Industry arrived under Japanese rule. From the late 1920s the Japanese industrialist Shitagau Noguchi built a nitrogen fertiliser complex at the port of Hungnam, powered by hydroelectric schemes his companies built in the mountains inland, and Hamhung grew into a company city around it. In the Korean War the area was fought over and bombed heavily: United Nations forces held it in late 1950, and as Chinese armies advanced the evacuation from Hungnam between 15 and 24 December carried troops and tens of thousands of civilians out by sea before the port installations were destroyed; counting Wonsan and Songjin, 98,100 civilians were taken out of north-eastern Korea.

Rebuilding began almost at once. From 1955 to 1962 an East German team planned and built a new city of wide avenues and low blocks, a large-scale programme that also trained Korean planners, architects and builders, and the chemical industry was restored and expanded, with the February 8 Vinalon Complex producing the synthetic fibre the state promoted as its own. The collapse of Soviet trade and the famine of the mid-1990s hit the city and its plants exceptionally hard.

Hamhung's identity rests on three things: the Joseon foundation story, heavy industry, and its food. The dynasty's early history gives the city its oldest monuments and a place in Korean historical memory on both sides of the border, while generations of chemical and machine work have made it a city of engineers, technicians and factory institutes. Its architecture is unusual in Korea — the 1950s East German plan left long boulevards, formal squares and blocks quite unlike Pyongyang's later monumental style.

The city is the anchor of the Hamgyong north-east culturally as well as administratively. The Hamgyong dialect is spoken here, blunter and sharply different from the standard of Pyongyang, and the region's reputation within Korea is for plain speech and hardiness. Hamhung naengmyeon, the chilli-dressed cold noodles, carries the city's name across the peninsula and is a point of local pride.

Official culture follows the national pattern: monuments and portraits of the leaders, mass gymnastics and dance displays on the anniversaries of the state calendar, and social life organised through work units, schools and neighbourhood groups. As across the country, religious practice is suppressed, and the surviving shrines and pavilions are maintained as heritage rather than as places of worship.

Hamhung has in the region of 770,000 people, making it the country's second city after Pyongyang, and it is the capital of South Hamgyong province. Together with the Hungnam district it forms the largest chemical-industry centre in the country, producing fertiliser, vinalon fibre, plastics and industrial chemicals, alongside machine building, shipbuilding and food processing. A medical college, a chemical-engineering university and a large hospital serve the wider province.

The plants have run intermittently for decades because of power and raw-material shortages, and the city's formal economy has never recovered its pre-1990 scale. Households supplement rationed supplies with market trading, private plots and fishing. Farming on the coastal plain grows maize, rice and potatoes, and the fishing fleet works out of Hungnam and the villages along the shore.

Daily life follows the national rhythm of assigned workplaces, organised study and political meetings, with markets filling the gaps. Electricity is unreliable, and winter heating depends on coal and wood. Trolleybuses and buses run along the wide avenues, bicycles are common, and in summer families go out to the beaches east of the city. The famine of the 1990s was severe here, and the industrial neighbourhoods around the chemical works have remained among the country's poorest.

Hamhung's noodles are the dish everyone knows. Hamhung naengmyeon is made from potato or sweet-potato starch, which gives it a chewy, elastic texture quite unlike the buckwheat noodles of Pyongyang, and it is served with a fierce red chilli dressing rather than cold broth, usually topped with marinated raw skate or pollock. Korean cooks on both sides of the border argue over which of the two cold-noodle traditions is better, and the Hamhung style travelled south with refugees during the Korean War.

The rest of the local kitchen comes from the sea and the cold uplands. Pollock is the staple catch, eaten fresh, dried on racks through the winter and salted as roe; squid is split and hung to dry, and clams, crab and sea urchin come from the bay. Gajami sikhae, flatfish fermented with millet, radish and chilli, is a Hamgyong speciality, sour and hot, and quite distinct from kimchi.

Potatoes and maize matter more than rice in everyday cooking, appearing as noodles, pancakes, dumpling wrappers and cakes. Wild greens and mushrooms are gathered in the hills. For most households meals are plain — maize or rice, kimchi, soup and whatever fish is available — while the multi-course meals put in front of tour groups are arranged by the state and bear little resemblance to them. Soju and locally brewed beer are the usual drinks.