Samjiyon

The plateau around Mount Paektu lay at the edge of Korean settlement for most of recorded history: high, cold, forested country held at different times by Koguryo, by the kingdom of Balhae and by Jurchen tribes, before the early Joseon kings pushed the frontier north to the Yalu and Tumen and planted garrisons along it. The mountain itself erupted catastrophically around the year 946, one of the largest eruptions of the last few thousand years, scattering ash as far as Japan and leaving the caldera that now holds the crater lake.

Modern Samjiyon grew from a scattering of forest and farming hamlets by the three small lakes that give the place its name. The forests around it were the ground of the anti-Japanese guerrilla campaigns of the 1930s, and the state's official history places Kim Il-sung's operations here, including the 1937 raid on nearby Pochonbo; a secret camp on the slopes of Paektu is presented as Kim Jong-il's birthplace, although records outside North Korea place his birth in the Soviet Far East. From the 1970s onwards monuments, museums and a grand statue were raised around the town to mark those claims, and school and work groups were sent on pilgrimages to them.

From the late 2010s the town was rebuilt on a large scale, with new housing, a hotel, a cultural hall, a ski slope and public buildings; Kim Jong-un opened the completed expansion in December 2019, and in the same month the status of Samjiyon was raised from county to city. The work was carried out with mobilised labour and presented as a model for the reconstruction of provincial towns. What has emerged is a small, orderly settlement whose purpose is at once political, agricultural and, when tours run, touristic.

Nothing here is separable from the mountain. Paektu appears on the state emblem and in the national anthem, the ruling family is described as the "Paektu bloodline", and organised pilgrimages bring students, soldiers and workers to the guerrilla sites around the town, often deliberately in deep winter to demonstrate endurance. Visitors are expected to treat the monuments and the mountain with the same formality shown in Pyongyang.

Beneath that, this is a Ryanggang highland community with its own character: a frontier region of foresters, potato farmers and border villages, speaking the north-eastern dialect, where houses are built against very long winters and wild foods gathered in the forest are a serious part of the household economy. Korean seasonal customs survive in domestic form, with graves visited at the lunar new year and at Chuseok.

The border is close, and the whole of the far north is the least sealed part of the country, with Chinese goods, phone signals and smuggled media reaching the Yalu towns first and heavy penalties attached to all of it. The UN Commission of Inquiry of 2014 documented systematic human-rights abuses across the country, and songbun, the ranking of families by political background, governs who may live in a place of this symbolic importance.

The city's population runs to the tens of thousands, spread between the rebuilt town and villages scattered across the plateau; this is one of the most thinly settled parts of Korea. New flats, a school, a hospital and a hotel give the centre a finished, uniform look that contrasts sharply with the older settlements in the woods around it.

Work is farming, forestry and services. Potatoes are the plateau's crop, grown at altitudes where rice will not ripen, and the state has promoted them heavily since the famine years of the 1990s; timber from the larch forests, blueberries and other wild harvests, and the processing plants built alongside the new town make up much of the rest. Tourism, both domestic pilgrimage and the foreign tours that have run in some years, is part of the town's declared purpose.

Life is shaped by the cold. Heating through a winter of five months or more depends on wood and coal, the growing season is short, roads can be blocked by snow, and supplies come a long way. Electricity is uneven outside priority buildings. The border closure of 2020 cut the cross-border trade that had helped sustain households across the far north, and the region's remoteness makes shortages harder to cushion than in the capital.

Ryanggang is potato country, and Samjiyon eats accordingly. Potatoes are boiled and eaten plain, mashed into dough for dumplings, pressed into chewy noodles, and made into kamja-tteok, cakes of ground potato starch that are a speciality of the northern highlands. Maize and millet were long the staples of the northern countryside, with rice a luxury brought up from the plains, and that pattern has only partly changed.

The forest supplies the rest. Mushrooms, bracken, wild garlic and mountain greens are gathered and dried, blueberries and other berries are picked on the plateau in late summer, and pine nuts and honey come from the same woods. Freshwater fish from the lakes and streams appear on local tables, and meat is scarce enough to be an occasion rather than a habit.

Kimchi is essential to surviving the winter, made in bulk at kimjang in autumn from cabbage and radish with chilli, garlic and salt; in a province this cold the pots are buried and keep well into spring. Soups of soybean paste, potato and greens are everyday food. Soju and other grain spirits are drunk, often flavoured with local berries or roots, and hot maize or barley tea is served against the cold.