Nampo

The mouth of the Taedong has been a way in to the interior for as long as Pyongyang has mattered, and the tombs of the Koguryo kingdom scattered across the plain behind the estuary show how populated this stretch of coast was by the fifth century. The settlement itself stayed small — a fishing and trading point on a tidal river — until the late nineteenth century, when the port then known as Chinnampo was opened to foreign trade in the 1890s and quickly grew into the outlet for Pyongyang's commerce.

Under Japanese rule from 1910 the port was expanded and industrialised, with smelting, engineering and glass works drawing labour from the countryside and rail lines built to carry ore and coal; the port had been opened to foreign trade in 1897, when it was known as Chinnampo, a name given under Japanese influence and later shortened to Nampo. The Korean War brought heavy bombing to the docks and factories, and the city was rebuilt afterwards along with the rest of the country's industrial base.

The defining project of its modern history is the West Sea Barrage, completed in 1986 after years of work: an eight-kilometre dam with locks and a road across the estuary, built to hold back the sea, secure fresh water for irrigation and industry and carry traffic across the river mouth. It is shown to visitors as evidence of self-reliance. Nampo has since been reorganised administratively more than once — a directly governed city from 1980 to 2004 and a special city, taking in surrounding counties, since 2010 — and it remains a principal west-coast port, handling much of its seaborne trade and shipbuilding.

Nampo is a working city rather than a ceremonial one, and its character comes from the port and the factories: workplaces organise much of social life, from study sessions and sports teams to the mobilisations that send crews to help with planting and harvest on the surrounding farms. The public culture is the same as the capital's — monuments, mosaics, slogan boards and the calendar of political anniversaries — but staged on a smaller scale.

The area's older layer is unusually deep. The painted Koguryo tombs at Kangso and Tokhung-ri, with their guardian animals, processions and scenes of daily life from the fourth and fifth centuries, are among the most important early Korean monuments anywhere, and they are presented locally as evidence of a long and independent Korean civilisation. Traditional holidays are still marked, with visits to ancestral graves at the lunar new year and Chuseok.

Coastal habits shape the rest: fishing families, shellfish gathering on the mudflats at low tide, and summer bathing along the shore west of the city. As elsewhere in the country, the UN Commission of Inquiry of 2014 documented systematic human-rights abuses, and songbun, the classification of families by political background, governs access to education, work and housing here as in every other city.

Nampo is the country's fourth-largest city by population: the 2008 census counted about 367,000 people in the special city, some 311,000 of them in the urban districts and the rest in the farming counties along the coast. Life divides between the apartment blocks of the central district, the housing estates attached to the big plants, and villages of low tiled houses among the fields and orchards inland.

Work is dominated by the port, the shipyard, the smelters and glassworks, and by the farms of the western plain, which is the country's main rice-growing region and supplies fruit as well; the orchards of Ryonggang county are known nationally for their apples. Since the 1990s famine, household economies have leaned on markets and private trade alongside state wages, and a port city with shipping connections sees more imported goods than inland towns of the same size.

The practical texture of life is set by shortages: electricity is intermittent outside priority industries, heating in winter relies on coal, and food prices in the markets are watched closely. Commuting is done on foot, by bicycle and on crowded buses. Since the border closure of 2020 reduced trade, the docks have been quieter than they were, and the city's fortunes follow the volume of goods moving through them.

The estuary and the Yellow Sea give Nampo a stronger seafood tradition than inland cities. Clams, oysters and other shellfish are gathered on the tidal flats and eaten grilled, steamed or in soups, and the local speciality is a shore cooking method in which clams are laid on a tray, doused with petrol and set alight so that they open in the flame. Grey mullet, croaker, crab and squid come in with the boats, and fish is dried on racks along the shore for the winter.

The farmland behind the city supplies the rest. This is the country's rice bowl, so rice appears more often than the maize that dominates in the mountain provinces, and the orchards inland produce the apples that are among the area's best-known products. Cabbage, radish and chilli from the same fields go into kimchi, and kimjang, the autumn making of the year's supply, is organised through workplaces and neighbourhoods as well as households.

Cooked dishes follow the western Korean pattern: kimchi and soybean paste stews, noodle dishes including the chilled buckwheat raengmyeon claimed by Pyongyang, and nokdu jijim, thick mung-bean pancakes, at holidays. Taedonggang beer from the capital and locally distilled soju are the usual drinks.