DPRK Forum

Time for some Google Earthing today. Thanks to NKEconWatch’s excellent North Korea Uncovered place marks, I can spend many, many hours looking around in amazement. Looking around, I ran into a city I have not heard of or found a lot of information about: Kanggye. One of the place marks is called Inphung Pavilion. Now how NKEconWatch found this place from the very little information out there is little short of amazing to me, but in all, looking at it, I have no clue what it was until I read the obscure KCNA entry from the placemark:

Pyongyang, March 17 (KCNA) — There are a lot of cultural inheritances with long history in Kanggye city, the seat of Jagang Province in the northwestern part of Korea. Among them are inphung and mangmi pavilions and Kanggye public office. They show peculiar national character and architecture. Inphung pavilion is situated on the River Jangja in the centre of Kanggye city. The wooden pavilion was built in harmony with its mission and landscape. In old times it was regarded as one of eight beauty spots in the northwestern part of Korea and now it has turned into a cultural recreation place for the people. Mangmi pavilion on a granite cliff has ten rounded columns. At that time, the pavilion was used as a military command post. Kanggye public office has the exterior of its main building and the archery place still preserved. The building, conducive to the study of the nation’s architectural history, is now the Kanggye History Museum. In the city there are also relics of the bronze age including ruined houses and stone coffin graves. The relics offer valuable data to the study of the people’s living at that time.

Emphasis mine. According to this entry, there is not a lot to go on, just some off the wall clues. The first one obviously will cover Inphung pavilion. Looking on the Google Earth map, it appears to be some kind of ice rink? I am not very sure, but the lake (Is it natural or man-made?) appears to be frozen. Whatever the case, no other information is available on this oddity. Well, it is not really an oddity per se, but in the large scheme of things, it is.

Continue reading ‘Places in the DPRK: Kanggye’