North Korea moves to reopen tourism for first time in five years

Two China-based tour operators announced on Wednesday that North Korea will allow group tours to the border city of Samjiyon beginning in December, marking the potential return of foreign tourists to the isolated regime after five years.

A hotel in Samjiyon, Ryanggang Province, is lit up at night in this photo released by the North's official Rodong Sinmun newspaper on July 14. [NEWS1]

Two China-based tour operators announced on Wednesday that North Korea will allow group tours to the border city of Samjiyon beginning in December, marking the potential return of foreign tourists to the isolated regime after five years.

In a post uploaded to its Facebook page, Shenyang-based KTG Tours said that North Korean authorities have given the green light for only Samjiyon, but that they “think Pyongyang and other places will open” as well in the future.

Beijing’s Koryo Tour wrote on its website the same day that it is “very excited for the opening of North Korean tourism once again” and that other destinations inside the reclusive regime could “potentially” open later.

North Korea has remained mostly closed to foreign tourism since it sealed its borders in early 2020 at the beginning of the global Covid-19 pandemic.

The self-imposed blockade strangled cross-border smuggling, leading to severe shortages of food and other essential goods, according to defectors who managed to escape despite tightened restrictions.

The only tourists allowed into the North since early 2024 have been from Russia, which the regime has supplied with weapons for its invasion of Ukraine in exchange for unspecified technological and military assistance.

Samjiyon is located in Ryanggang Province at the base of Mount Paektu, the highest point on the Korean Peninsula.

The regime claims the dormant volcano was where North Korea’s founder Kim Il Sung, grandfather of current leader Kim Jong-un, established a secret camp and carried out guerrilla activities against Japanese forces.

The “Paektu bloodline” of the regime’s leaders is frequently extolled by state propaganda, which also claims that Kim Il Sung’s son and Kim Jong-un’s father, Kim Jong-il, was born at the secret camp.

However, Soviet records show that Kim Il Sung carried out garrison duties under the Red Army during World War II and that his son was born in the Soviet Union during that period.

Samjiyon has undergone massive development aimed at attracting foreign tourists, including an expanded airport, ski resort and new railways and hotels, according to state media reports.

Although Koryo Tours says on its website that the North bars only South Koreans from entering, the United States has banned its citizens from traveling to the country since the death of Otto Warmbier in July 2017.

Warmbier was a 22-year-old U.S. college student who joined a trip to the North organized by Young Pioneer Tours in late December 2015. He was detained and later sentenced to 15 years’ imprisonment for attempting to steal a propaganda poster in his Pyongyang hotel.

He was released in a vegetative state in June 2017 and died at a hospital in Ohio without ever awakening.

The U.S. State Department renewed its travel ban to North Korea for the eighth consecutive year on Aug. 6.

BY MICHAEL LEE [lee.junhyuk@joongang.co.kr]