As international sanctions continue to provoke, and unsuccessfully disrupt, nuclear development in North Korea, Pyongyang’s hotels offer a window into a veiled economic history and built environment otherwise elided by western media. 

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To suggest that its quarter-of-a-century presence in the rapidly expanding Pyongyang skyline merits the international mockery it has received—fatalistically nicknamed the “hotel of doom” by Western journalists, labeled an architectural sin, and deemed the biggest mystery in Pyongyang—would consign Ryugyong to the realm of compulsive political affect ranging from imaginative resentment to the very policies governing U.S.-North Korean relations since American involvement in the Korean War. 

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An aerial view of Pyongyang, with the Ryugyong Hotel rising in the background.
An aerial view of Pyongyang, with the Ryugyong Hotel rising in the background. © m•o•m•o.

A cargo vessel bearing the Cambodian flag, the Jie Shun, floats inactive in the El-Adabiya port south-west of the Suez Canal. On the 28th of August 2016, Washington calculates its coordinates and informs Cairo of the tarp-shrouded bulk freighter’s location. Upon arrival a year later on the 1st of October 2017, Egyptian customs agents inspect the vessel and discover roughly 30,000 soviet-style rocket propelled grenades concealed beneath containers of iron ore. The Jie Shun sailed not from Cambodia, but from North Korea. This discrete maneuver illustrates the type of rogue tactics the DPRK uses to ensure meager economic survival amidst, thus far, eight rounds of unanimously imposed U.N. sanctions since the nation’s first nuclear test in 2006. Since then, sanctions have expanded to include the trade of arms and military equipment, iron, seafood, mineral, coal, luxury goods, caps on oil imports and North Korean labor exports, along with asset freezes for those involved in the DPRK’s nuclear program.

Just weeks prior to Jie Shun’s arrival in the Suez Canal, an executive order by President Trump enabled the Treasury to block any entity engaging in transactions with North Korea from the U.S. financial system. The order attempts to target those who “enable this regime’s economic activity wherever  they are located.” Furthermore, United States Security Council Resolution 2375, adopted on 11 September 2017, now restricts textile exports, an industry formerly untouched. Manufacturing is the largest industry in Pyongyang, and the third largest in the entire country. Resolution 2375 aspires further to “starvethe regime of any revenues generated” through joint ventures to “stop all future foreign investments in technology transfers to North Korea’s nascent and weak commercial industries.”

In such an aggressively sanctioned economy — the effects of which make life more unbearable for the North Korean population rather than halting their government’s nuclear programs — the U.S. State Department Bureau of Consular Affairs urges tourists to “consider what they might be supporting.” The Bureau even speculates that tourist revenue may be channeled to fund nuclear development. This, with the Treasury block, would seem to suggest that by engaging the DPRK’S small accommodation and service industries, a tourist’s monetary trail could constitute a series of “enabling” transactions between the individual and the state. 

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