Pyongyang

The Taedong basin holds one of the oldest continuously settled sites in Korea. Korean tradition places the capital of ancient Gojoseon here; after Han China destroyed that state in 108 BC, the Chinese commandery of Lelang administered the area for some four centuries. In 427 the kingdom of Koguryo moved its capital to Pyongyang, and the painted burial chambers scattered around the city, part of a UNESCO World Heritage Site, are its oldest surviving monuments. Under Koryo the city was the western capital, and under Joseon the seat of Pyongan province and a trading town on the road to China.

Its modern shape was set by destruction. In 1866 the American merchant ship General Sherman was burned on the Taedong, an episode the state still presents as an early victory over the United States. By the early twentieth century Pyongyang had one of the largest Protestant communities in Korea, and under Japanese rule it industrialised. In 1945 it became the capital of the Soviet-backed North; occupied briefly by UN forces in 1950, it was then almost levelled by bombing during the Korean War; almost nothing was left standing, and landmarks such as the Potong Gate were reconstructed afterwards.

Reconstruction from the 1950s produced the city visitors see: a plan of very wide avenues, ceremonial squares, riverside parks and blocks of flats, laid out by Korean and eastern European planners and filled over the following decades with monuments, towers and arches on a deliberately grand scale. Later building has continued the pattern, from the deep metro of the 1970s and the monuments of the 1980s to the tall, brightly painted apartment avenues of the 2010s, while residence in the capital has remained something the state grants rather than something people choose.

Pyongyang is the model the rest of the country is measured against. Its speech, based on the surrounding Pyongan dialect, is the basis of the North Korean standard language; its dress, manners and public conduct are presented as the national norm; and the set-piece events of the political calendar — parades on Kim Il-sung Square, torchlight rallies, flower festivals, and mass gymnastics in some years — are staged in the capital and broadcast from it. Visitors are expected to take part in the formal side of this, bowing at the Mansu Hill statues and treating images of the leaders with care.

Beneath the official layer the city has a recognisable urban culture. The Pyongyang Circus and the theatres put on performances, football and other sports draw large crowds to the stadiums, and the state musical groups formed in the 2010s have a following. Families walk on Moran Hill on holidays, students fill the Grand People's Study House, and the funfairs and water park built in the last fifteen years are genuinely popular.

Everyday courtesies are Korean: bowing on meeting, using two hands to give and receive, taking shoes off indoors, and deference to age. Beyond that, the UN Commission of Inquiry of 2014 documented systematic human-rights abuses across the country, and songbun, the state's classification of families by political background, shapes education, work and the right to live in the capital at all.

Around three million people live in Pyongyang, and it is by some distance the best-supplied place in the country: electricity is more reliable than elsewhere, new apartment districts have been built steadily, and the shops carry goods that are scarce in the provinces. Residence is controlled, and living here is itself a marker of standing.

Days run to a fixed rhythm of work units, political study sessions and neighbourhood organisations, with mornings starting early and mobilisation for public projects and farm work a regular demand on city workers. Commuting is by tram, trolleybus, metro and on foot; traffic is light, and the uniformed traffic officers at junctions are among the most photographed sights in the city. Bicycles have become far more common than they once were.

The formal economy rests on government, heavy industry, construction and services, but since the famine of the 1990s most households have depended partly on markets, and a class of traders and officials with access to foreign currency has become visible in the capital's restaurants and shops. Mobile phones on the domestic network are widespread, though they cannot reach the outside world. Power cuts, food prices and the reach of the markets are the practical concerns that shape ordinary life.

Pyongyang claims several dishes that North Koreans treat as national showpieces. Pyongyang raengmyeon is the best known: chewy buckwheat noodles in a chilled beef or pheasant broth, dressed with radish kimchi, sliced meat, half an egg and a slice of pear, and eaten with scissors to cut the coil. It is served most famously at Okryu-gwan on the riverbank. Pyongyang onban, "rice with soup", is rice in hot chicken broth topped with shredded chicken, mushrooms and a mung-bean pancake, and nokdu jijim, the thick mung-bean pancake, is also eaten on its own with soy dipping sauce.

The river and the western plain supply the rest. Grey mullet soup from the Taedong is a dish the city claims as its own, freshwater fish and shellfish appear on restaurant menus, and the plain around the capital is the country's main rice-growing area, so rice is more common on the table here than in the mountainous provinces. Kimchi is central through the winter, and kimjang, the autumn making of a household's year's supply of cabbage kimchi, remains a major event.

Drinking is led by Taedonggang, the draught beer brewed in the city since the early 2000s on equipment bought from a brewery in England, and by soju and stronger grain spirits. Tea, soft drinks and ice cream are sold from kiosks on the avenues in summer. For visitors, meals are taken where the tour programme puts them, and the markets where residents buy most of their food are not part of what is shown.