Sinuiju

Sinuiju is a young city in an old place. The lower Yalu was long guarded from Uiju, the walled town upstream that controlled the crossing to China and the route embassies took to Beijing, and Wihwa Island in the river is remembered as the spot where a Korean general turned his army back in 1388, a decision that led to the fall of the Koryo dynasty and the founding of Joseon. The settlement that became Sinuiju — the name means "new Uiju" — was laid out on the flat riverbank in the early twentieth century.

What made it was the railway. Under Japanese rule a bridge was built across the Yalu, opening in 1911, linking the Korean network to the Manchurian lines and turning the new town into the peninsula's land gateway to the north. Sawmills, chemical plants and paper mills followed, using timber floated down the river and power from the great dams built upstream. A second, sturdier bridge was completed in 1943.

The Korean War exposed that position. The city was heavily bombed, the 1911 bridge was destroyed and never rebuilt, and Chinese troops and supplies crossed the surviving span from 1950. Rebuilt afterwards as a provincial capital and industrial centre, Sinuiju has since lived by its border: declared a special administrative region in 2002 in an experiment that collapsed within weeks when the businessman appointed to run it was detained in China, and remaining the principal crossing for the trade with China on which the national economy depends. A new bridge downstream, begun in 2011 as a replacement for it, has still not opened.

More than any other North Korean city, Sinuiju looks outward. Dandong stands a few hundred metres away across the water, close enough that its tower blocks and neon are part of the view, and the contrast between the two riverfronts is the image by which the city is known abroad. Chinese goods, money and, informally, Chinese television and phone signals reach here first, and traders and border officials form a recognisable local class.

The official culture is the same as everywhere in the country: monuments and mosaics on the central square, flower-laying on the leaders' anniversaries, workplace study sessions and mass mobilisations at planting and harvest. North Pyongan's speech belongs to the Pyongan dialect group on which the North Korean standard language is based. Traditional holidays are marked at home, with visits to ancestral graves at the lunar new year and Chuseok.

The border also defines what is forbidden. Smuggling, unauthorised crossings and the distribution of foreign media carry severe penalties, and the riverbank is closely watched on both sides. As elsewhere in the country, the UN Commission of Inquiry of 2014 documented systematic human-rights abuses, and songbun, the ranking of families by political background, determines who may live and work in a city of this sensitivity.

Several hundred thousand people live in Sinuiju, making it one of the country's larger cities and the capital of North Pyongan province. The centre is a flat grid of apartment blocks, with industrial estates and their housing spreading inland and villages of tiled houses among the reclaimed fields towards the estuary.

The economy is the border. Customs, transport, warehousing and the handling of freight between Chinese and Korean railway wagons employ a great many people, and the chemical, textile, paper and enamelware plants of the city depend on materials coming the same way. Markets here are better stocked than almost anywhere else in the country, and a substantial informal trade in Chinese consumer goods has long run alongside the official one, which is why Sinuiju is usually described as relatively prosperous by national standards.

That also makes the city unusually exposed to politics. Sanctions, Chinese enforcement and above all the border closure of 2020 cut the traffic across the bridge for years, with sharp effects on local livelihoods, and the resumption of trade has been partial and closely controlled. Electricity is intermittent, heating in winter relies on coal, and bicycles and buses carry most people to work.

Sinuiju eats from the river and from across it. Freshwater fish from the Yalu — carp, catfish and small river fish — is grilled or simmered in spicy soups, and the same dishes are a speciality of Dandong on the Chinese bank. Shellfish and sea fish come up from the estuary, and the reclaimed plain behind the city grows rice, maize, cabbage and chilli.

Chinese influence is stronger here than anywhere else in the country. Stir-fried dishes, wheat noodles, dumplings and Chinese seasonings turn up on menus and in home cooking, and Chinese snacks, drinks, cooking oil and flour brought across the bridge are normal market goods. What arrives in Sinuiju tends to reach Pyongyang's markets afterwards.

The Korean staples remain the base: rice or maize with soup and side dishes, soybean paste stews, and kimchi made in bulk each autumn at kimjang, when households and workplaces prepare a winter's supply of cabbage and radish with chilli, garlic and salted seafood. Cold buckwheat raengmyeon, the dish claimed by Pyongyang, is eaten in summer; nokdu jijim, thick mung-bean pancakes, appear at holidays. Soju and Taedonggang beer from the capital are the usual drinks, with Chinese spirits and beer circulating through the border trade.