A Hundred Metres Under Pyongyang
For decades visitors to Pyongyang were shown two stations of its metro and nothing else, which was enough for a theory to take hold that the rest of the system did not exist. It does, it has run since 1973, and what is genuinely known about it is a good measure of how much anyone outside knows about the country above it.
The escalator down to Puhung station takes about three minutes. That is the number every visitor comes back with, because it is the only measurement they are in a position to take. The depth is given at around a hundred metres (330 ft), the walls at the bottom carry a mosaic of Kim Il Sung among a crowd, chandeliers hang over the platform, and the day's Rodong Sinmun is mounted in lit frames along the wall for people to read while they wait. A train arrives, the doors open, commuters get on. For most of the system's life, foreign visitors rode one stop to Yonggwang, came back up, and that was the Pyongyang metro.
Out of that arrangement grew a claim that circulated for years: that the metro was a stage set, two decorated stations and a shuttle, and that the passengers were actors. It was a reasonable thing to suspect and it was wrong. The system opened in 1973, it has sixteen stations in service on two lines, and it moves a working population around a city of several million every day. What is interesting is not that the theory was false but how long it survived, and what it took to kill it.
Built to be a shelter
Construction began in the late 1960s and the first section of the Chollima Line opened on 6 September 1973, with the Hyoksin Line following later in the decade and the extension out to Yonggwang and Puhung opening in 1987. Both lines stay on the west bank of the Taedong; nothing has ever run under the river. The depth was not an engineering accident. Pyongyang had been destroyed by aerial bombardment between 1950 and 1953 — comprehensively enough that the city was rebuilt on a fresh plan afterwards — and the metro was designed from the start to function as a shelter for the population that had lived through it. The station entrances carry heavy blast doors, hinged to swing shut across the passage, and they are not concealed. Moscow, Kyiv and Beijing built the same logic into their deep lines in the same decades. Pyongyang had a more specific reason than any of them.
The two-station tour
Why only two stations were shown is a question with no published answer, and the guesses divide about evenly between security doctrine and the ordinary logistics of moving a group through a working railway. What is documented is when it changed. Full rides along the Chollima Line began to be permitted around 2010, and from roughly 2014 tour groups were routinely taken the length of it and onto parts of the Hyoksin Line, changing at Chonu. The stations away from the tourist pair turned out to be plainer — less marble, fewer chandeliers, the same blast doors — which is exactly what a real transport system looks like when the money went to the flagship stops. There is also a station, Kwangmyong, near the Kumsusan palace, that has been closed since the mid-1990s and which trains pass through without stopping.
A metro is one of the hardest things in the world to fake and one of the easiest to misjudge. Pyongyang's has been misjudged in both directions — first as a stage set, then as a system anyone can describe.
The Berlin carriages
The clearest thing anyone outside knows about the system is what it runs on, and that is because the rolling stock has a paper trail elsewhere. The original trains were Chinese-built. Around the turn of the millennium Pyongyang bought a large batch of second-hand Type D cars from Berlin — carriages built for the West Berlin U-Bahn in the late 1950s and early 1960s and retired by the operator there. They were repainted and refitted, and passengers have periodically reported German-language markings surviving under the new livery. In 2016 domestically built cars appeared on the Chollima Line and were presented as North Korean manufacture. The provenance of the fleet is verifiable from the seller's end, which makes it the one part of the system that can be checked without going.
What the numbers will not do
Almost everything else is a figure with a single source. Officials have quoted daily ridership at various points somewhere between three hundred thousand and seven hundred thousand, and none of those numbers can be independently verified; nor can the depth, which comes from the operator and has never been externally surveyed, and which is routinely reported abroad as the deepest metro in the world when the deepest single station anywhere is Arsenalna in Kyiv at about 105 metres (345 ft). The fare is a flat few won, which at any realistic exchange rate is not money in a sense a visitor would recognise. Even the total length of track is given differently in different places, at somewhere over twenty kilometres (12 mi). This is the normal condition of information about North Korea: not an absence of numbers but an abundance of unverifiable ones, which is a harder problem.
What it is for
The metro is not even how most of Pyongyang travels: the city runs trams, reintroduced in 1991 after decades without them, and an extensive trolleybus network, and between them they are reckoned to carry more passengers than the two underground lines do. Neither has ever attracted a theory. A third metro line has appeared on planning documents since the 1970s and has never opened. The instinct, looking at a chandelier a hundred metres below a country that has struggled to feed itself, is to read the whole thing as theatre, and some of it is — the mosaics and the station names, Rehabilitation, Glory, Torch, Triumphant Return, Reunification, are a curated argument about the state delivered to people on their way to work. But the tunnels are real, they were dug at genuine expense, and they carry a city with almost no private cars. The most useful correction the metro offers is not about propaganda. It is that a place written about almost entirely as a headline is also a place where several hundred thousand people get on a train in the morning, and that both of those things are true at the same depth.