Kaesong

Kaesong was already an important town when Wang Kon, a merchant family's son from the area, founded the Koryo dynasty in 918 and made his home town the capital the following year. For almost five centuries it was the seat of Korean government: a walled city of palaces, Buddhist monasteries and the Songgyungwan academy, with Manwoldae, the royal palace, terraced up the slope of Mount Songak. Its merchants traded with China and beyond and grew wealthy on ginseng. The Mongol invasions of the 13th century drove the court to Ganghwa Island for decades, and a Red Turban army burnt the palace in 1361; it was never rebuilt.

In 1392 the general Yi Seong-gye took the throne, founded the Joseon dynasty and moved the capital to Seoul. The Koryo loyalist Chong Mong-ju was killed on the Sonjuk Bridge for refusing to accept the change, and the city, stripped of the court, turned to commerce. Kaesong's traders, the songsang, ran networks across the peninsula and were credited with an early double-entry bookkeeping system; ginseng cultivation became their most profitable business.

After 1945 Kaesong lay just south of the 38th parallel and belonged to South Korea. Fighting in June 1950 swept through it, armistice talks opened here in 1951 before moving to nearby Panmunjom, and the 1953 agreement left the city on the northern side of the new line — the only city to pass from South Korean to North Korean control as a result of the war. From 2004 the Kaesong Industrial Region on its southern edge employed North Korean workers in South Korean-run factories until it was closed in 2016.

Kaesong's sense of itself comes from the Koryo centuries and from trade. Its citizens were known throughout Korea as shrewd, self-reliant merchants, a reputation that outlasted the dynasty by hundreds of years, and the ginseng business gave the city a distinct commercial culture with its own accounting methods and guild-like networks. The surviving monuments of the capital — the palace platforms, the walls, the academy, the gate and the royal tombs — were inscribed together as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2013.

The city is also the country's showcase of traditional Korean building. Its old town of tiled, single-storey courtyard houses survived the war better than most, and the state has maintained it, using part of it as a hotel where guests sleep on heated floors in the old manner. Kaesong cuisine, developed for the Koryo court and later for wealthy merchants, is treated as a national heritage in its own right.

Official culture is the national one: monuments and portraits of the leaders, organised commemorations, and social life structured through work units and schools. Because of the border, the state's account of the war and of division is unusually present here, and school groups are brought to Panmunjom and the war memorials. Religious practice is suppressed, and the Buddhist and Confucian sites are maintained as heritage rather than as places of worship.

Kaesong has in the region of 200,000 people. It is unusual among North Korean cities in that a large part of the population still lives in traditional courtyard houses rather than in blocks of flats, with concrete housing built mainly on the newer streets to the north.

The economy rests on farming and food processing on the fertile southern plain, ginseng growing and processing, light industry, textiles and the administration of the surrounding counties. The closure of the inter-Korean industrial estate in 2016 removed what had been the area's largest employer and its main source of foreign currency, and the halt in tourism since 2020 removed another, since DMZ day trips had brought a steady flow of groups through the city.

Daily life follows the national pattern of assigned workplaces, rationing supplemented by market trading, and regular political meetings. Farm work at planting and harvest draws in students, soldiers and office workers from the city. Military units are a constant presence in the countryside towards the border, and movement in the frontier zone is tightly controlled even for residents. Electricity is intermittent, heating depends on coal and wood, and bicycles and buses carry most people to work.

Kaesong has one of Korea's most admired regional kitchens, a legacy of five centuries as a royal capital followed by centuries of merchant wealth. Its signature dish is bossam kimchi, in which whole cabbage leaves are folded into parcels around a filling of radish, seafood, chestnut, pear and pine nuts — rich, elaborate and quite unlike everyday kimchi. Pyonsu, square dumplings of meat and vegetables served chilled in summer, are another speciality, as is the multi-dish tray meal in which many small bowls are set out at once.

Ginseng, or insam, runs through the local cooking as well as the local economy. The root goes into chicken soup, teas, sweets and liquor, and is sold dried, candied and in extract form. Kaesong's confectionery is known too, above all umegi, or Kaesong juak — small fried cakes of glutinous rice coated in syrup and filled with jujube or chestnut, eaten above all on holidays.

The Hwanghae plains around the city are the country's main grain belt, so rice figures more in everyday meals here than in the mountainous north, alongside maize, soybeans and vegetables; the Yellow Sea to the south-west supplies clams, crab and fish. For most households, though, meals are plain — rice or maize, kimchi and soup — and the elaborate banquets served to tour groups represent a court tradition rather than daily cooking. Soju, rice wine and ginseng liquor are the usual drinks.