Rason

The two towns that make up Rason were fishing and farming settlements on a remote stretch of the Tumen coast until the Japanese colonial period, when Rajin's deep, sheltered and largely ice-free bay was singled out as the natural sea outlet for Manchuria. A port and a railway to the interior were built in the 1930s, and the town grew quickly around them. Sonbong, to the north-east, developed later around fuel and power.

After the division of Korea and the Korean War the ports continued to work, and the area kept its strategic value as the one place where North Korea touches both China and Russia. In 1991, as the Soviet trading system collapsed, the government designated the Rajin-Sonbong Free Economic and Trade Zone, the country's first attempt at a market enclave. The two towns were merged and later renamed Rason, a compound of both names.

Results came slowly. Investment was hampered by poor infrastructure, shifting rules and the country's isolation, but from the late 2000s Chinese and Russian interest in the port revived: docks at Rajin were leased to foreign operators, one of them taken by a Chinese company for ten years in 2017, and coal moved through the harbour for transhipment. International sanctions from 2016 onwards narrowed that trade sharply, and the closure of the borders in 2020 halted cross-border traffic and the tours that had come from China. When foreigners were let in again in February 2025 it was to Rason and not the capital, and the border shut once more a month later.

Rason's character comes from the border. This is the corner of the country where foreign goods, foreign money and foreign faces are least unusual: Chinese traders, Russian shipping crews and a small number of resident foreign staff have all been part of the city's life, and Chinese yuan circulates widely. The zone has operated under its own regulations on investment, labour and entry, which has given it a reputation inside the country as somewhere apart.

The official culture is the national one. Portraits and monuments to the country's leaders stand in the main squares, the anniversaries of the state calendar are marked with organised gatherings, and schools, work units and neighbourhood organisations structure most social life. Visitors are expected to treat these sites with formality.

Regionally, Rason belongs to the Hamgyong north-east: the local speech is the Hamgyong dialect, sharply different from the standard of Pyongyang, and the cooking, the fishing calendar and the reliance on potatoes and maize are shared with the coast and highlands to the south and west. The city has also been a window for the outside world in the other direction — foreign journalists and delegations have seen more of ordinary market life here than almost anywhere else in the country.

Rason's population is modest beside the country's main cities, and is spread over a wide municipal area that includes farmland, forest and coast as well as the two towns. It is administered directly as a special city rather than as part of a province, which reflects the zone's separate legal footing.

Work centres on the port, on fishing and seafood processing, on light manufacturing in the zone's industrial areas, and on cross-border trade with China. Sonbong's refinery and power station, built for Soviet-era crude, have run intermittently for years. A hotel and casino by the sea caters to Chinese visitors, and seafood exports to China were for a time the area's most reliable source of foreign currency until sanctions restricted them.

Ordinary life follows the national pattern of assigned workplaces, rationing supplemented by markets, and political meetings, but the markets here are better stocked than inland because of the border. Electricity is unreliable, winter heating depends on coal and wood, and housing is mostly low blocks and single-storey terraces. The closure of the frontier in 2020 cut the informal trade on which many households had come to depend, and traffic through the port has been reduced by sanctions.

The kitchen here is the Hamgyong coast's: fish first, then potatoes, maize and millet, with rice less central than in the south of the country. Pollock (myongtae) is the defining catch, eaten fresh in winter, dried on racks along the shore, and salted as roe; squid is split and hung to dry in the sea wind, and clams and crab come from the shallow waters near the Tumen mouth.

The regional speciality is gajami sikhae, flatfish fermented with millet, radish and chilli — pungent, sour and hot, quite unlike the kimchi of the south. Cold noodles in the Hamgyong style are made from potato or sweet-potato starch and served chewy, with a red chilli dressing rather than the icy broth of Pyongyang naengmyeon, and are often topped with seasoned raw fish. Potato appears as noodles, as dumpling wrappers and in cakes, a habit shared with the highlands inland.

Because of the border, Rason's markets carry more imported food than most of the country: Chinese cooking oil, flour, seasonings and sweets, and Russian goods brought in by ship and rail. Meals served to visitors are state-arranged and generally more elaborate than daily household fare, which for most people means rice or maize, soup, kimchi and whatever fish is going. Soju and locally brewed beer are the usual drinks.