On the 4th of July 2006, during the United States’ Independence Day celebration, North Korea held a missile test—some would say a missile demonstration to prove its ability to launch the Taepodong-2 (CNN , 2006) and apparently upgraded short-range missiles as well. Pyongyang pursued its plan to conduct the missile drill in spite of all…
A Grey Man was first published in 1963. It is the second significant work by the novelist Ch’oe Inhun, best known for his first published work The Square which was written following the April 19 Revolution in 1960. Ch’oe Inhun was born in 1936 in present day North Korea and fled to the South with…
Since 1993, Koryo Group has specialised in travel to the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) and in tourism and cultural exchanges with the country. The company has visited North Korea almost every month since 1993 and takes in around 70 per cent of all Western tourists to the country. In 2005, 700 tourists visited…
Perhaps it is invidious to pose my title in the form of a question: bamboo curtain or open door? It is not that it is always impossible to establish the truth about the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK). It is more that, having arrived at the truth, one is more than likely to conclude…
The author visited Kaesŏng as a representative of the Museum of London. His paper sketches out the proposals made at the time of his visit for an archaeological survey of Kaesŏng and its hinterland. In presenting his observations, he will repeat a couple of caveats: he is in no way a specialist in Korean archaeology;…
In October and December 1990, North and South Korea sent parties of musicians to each other in an exchange of musical performances intended to express the will for unification. On other occasions, one side has sent a musical delegation to the other, but this is the only time to date there has been a reciprocal…
The invitation to the World Koreanists Forum 2005,1 described as being “For the Global Network of Korean Studies”, came as the result of a response2 I had sent to the web-based Korean Studies Discussion List on the problems facing Korean studies departments in the United Kingdom. (All such departments are, in fact, located in English…
For all that the Chosŏn yangban took such pride in their sinocentric culture, they could not claim to have kept up with their Chinese neighbours in the tradition of connoisseurship. Put bluntly, the majority of them simply had not cultivated the habit of collecting bronzes, porcelain, and the paintings of bygone ages, or commissioning new…
In You Always Remember the First Time, a volume of stories edited by the avantgarde writer B. S. Johnson, story 19 begins with a nineteen-year-old English boy on his National Service, in search of a radical departure from home. Download article | 261.20 KB 746 downloads … Members Please login for full content or subscribe for…
This paper is an attempt to explain what compelled me to embark on the foolhardy enterprise of trying to write a novel inspired by my reading of the memoirs of Lady Hong, the Crown Princess, and why the novel took the form it did. This project was fraught with difficulties, and I am grateful for…