Postcards from North Korea

Here's why these outdated scenes of a workers' paradise are still on sale in North Korea, despite a lack of tourists

Picture this: you are on holiday, it’s time to write home, and you have to choose a postcard from the racks. What are you going to pick? The choice for tourists to North Korea are plentiful, if a little one-note in terms of subject matter, as Nicholas Bonner explains in our new book Made in North Korea.

A magician performs his best floral tricks in this postcard

“In August 1953 (one month after Korean War ended), the state’s national travel service, Korea International Travel Company (KITC), was founded. It provides travel and tourism services to visitors from overseas and, although it has been joined by a number of other (also state-owned) companies since its inception, it remains the largest and most well known.

A postcard featuring the Pyongyang National Circus

“Tourism in North Korea was slow to get going; initially visitors came only from brother socialist nations, then from the nascent Non-Aligned Movement and finally in 1987 there was an opening to allow Western tourists into the country, from which humble beginnings up to 5,000 such visitors now make the journey into North Korea each year.

“Due to the historical shortage of tourists there are still large stocks of badges, postcards, 3D postcards as well as political books and guidebooks from the 1980s to be found, printed in a variety of languages from English to Arabic.”

A presentation postcard set published in 1968. ‘Chollima’ refers to the speed campaign of post-war reconstruction and development in the aftermath of World War II.

Some celebrate the the revolutionary opera Song of Mount Gumgang-san; others depict peformers in the Pyongyang National Circus; while further cards show such collective enterprises as the Nampo glassworks which once produced fine examples of stained glass, but is now, alas closed.

A postcard picturing Nampo glassworks, as featured in Made in North Korea

Given the US travel ban, and the increasing levels of international condemnation, it seems unlikely that North Korea’s postcard vendors will run low on stock any time soon, ensuring that these visions of a strange, techncolour workers’ paradise will remain on the market for some time to come.

Made in North Korea

For a longer look behind at this singular country’s design culture order a copy of Made in North Korea here.