The Yanggakdo International Hotel is the largest operating hotel in

North Korea North Korea, officially the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK), is a country in East Asia. It constitutes the northern half of the Korea, Korean Peninsula and shares borders with China and Russia to the north, at the Yalu River, Y ...

, pending the completion of the

Ryugyong Hotel The Ryugyong Hotel (; sometimes spelled as Ryu-Gyong Hotel), or Yu-Kyung Hotel, more commonly known outside of North Korea as the "Hotel of Doom", is an unfinished 105-story, pyramid-shaped skyscraper in Pyongyang, North Korea. Its name ("cap ...

, and the country's seventh- or eighth-tallest building. The hotel is located on Yanggak Island in the River Taedong, to the south-east of the centre of

Pyongyang Pyongyang (, , ) is the capital and largest city of North Korea, where it is known as the "Capital of the Revolution". Pyongyang is located on the Taedong River about upstream from its mouth on the Yellow Sea. According to the 2008 populatio ...

, the nation's capital. It rises to an overall height of and has a slowly

revolving restaurant A revolving restaurant or rotating restaurant is usually a tower restaurant eating space designed to rest atop a broad circular revolving platform that operates as a large turntable. The building remains stationary and the diners are carried on ...

on the 47th floor. This hotel is North Korea's first luxury hotel, The structure was built between 1986 and 1992 by France's Campenon Bernard Construction Company and opened in 1996.

Background

Besides housing the reception, the ground floor offers the purchase of North Korean

currency A currency, "in circulation", from la, currens, -entis, literally meaning "running" or "traversing" is a standardization of money in any form, in use or circulation as a medium of exchange, for example banknotes and coins. A more general def ...

sets, postcards and letters, and basic commodities at Western prices. There is a bar and a bookshop which stocks North Korean reading material including treatises of President

Kim Il-sung Kim Il-sung (; , ; born Kim Song-ju, ; 15 April 1912 – 8 July 1994) was a North Korean politician and the founder of North Korea, which he ruled from the country's establishment in 1948 until his death in 1994. He held the posts of ...

and General

Kim Jong-il Kim Jong-il (; ; ; born Yuri Irsenovich Kim;, 16 February 1941 – 17 December 2011) was a North Korean politician who was the second supreme leader of North Korea from 1994 to 2011. He led North Korea from the 1994 death of his father Kim ...

. In addition to the revolving restaurant, the hotel guide issued to guests indicates that the hotel contains four further restaurants on the second floor: dining-rooms one and two, the main banquet hall, and the Japanese, Chinese and Korean food dining-rooms. The basement contains a bowling alley, a pool room, a sauna, a swimming pool, a barber shop, a casino, and a massage club. The price of the hotel is $499 a night for two adults. The hotel's grounds originally included a nine-hole golf course. In 2011 the golf course was demolished to make space for a Chinese-funded health complex to be built. Also located on Yanggak Island, next to the hotel's grounds, is the

Pyongyang International Cinema Hall The International Cinema Hall () is a cinema located in North Korea.Democratic People's Republic ...

, one of the main venues for the Pyongyang International Film Festival. The Yanggakdo International Hotel is a standard stop on most tours of North Korea.

Fifth floor

The fifth floor of the hotel has been a source of curiosity among foreigners because it is off-limits to hotel guests. The elevators do not stop on the fifth floor; hence, there is no fifth-floor button on the elevator panel. The fifth floor has occasionally been visited "unofficially" via staircase by tourists exploring the hotel. It is reported to be further split into two separate floors, with mostly locked rooms, and is decorated with propaganda posters. Tourists have also reported seeing surveillance equipment apparently used to observe guests' rooms. One Western travel agency specialising in tours of North Korea has described the fifth floor as "actually just a service level much like would be found in any hotel, and strictly off limits to tourists."

Otto Warmbier incident

On 2 January 2016, a visiting American university student,

Otto Warmbier Otto Frederick Warmbier (December 12, 1994 – June 19, 2017) was an American college student who was imprisoned in North Korea in 2016 on a charge of subversion. In June 2017, he was released by North Korea in a vegetative state and died ...

, was arrested on a charge of attempting to steal a political propaganda banner from a restricted area of the hotel. Although some early media reports speculated that the incident had occurred on the hotel's fifth floor, Warmbier himself indicated in a confession that he took down the banner from a staff-only area of the second floor of the hotel, but abandoned the item after discovering it was too large to carry away. Staff members from the hotel testified against Warmbier at his trial. On 16 March 2016, Warmbier was sentenced to 15 years' imprisonment with hard labor. After seventeen months in captivity, it was revealed that Warmbier had suffered severe brain damage, and he was brought back to the United States in June 2017, dying six days later.

Gallery

File:Dprk-hotel-yanggakdo.jpg, The hotel's façade seen from the ground level File:Yanggakdo-Hotel-Lobby-2014.jpg, Hotel lobby area, March 2014 File:The Taedong River in Pyongyang.jpg, The hotel seen from the top of the

Juche Tower The ''Juche'' Tower (more formally, the Tower of the ''Juche'' Idea), completed in 1982, is a monument in Pyongyang, the capital of North Korea, and is named after the ideology of ''Juche'' introduced by the country's first leader, Kim Il-sung. ...

File:Yanggakdo International Hotel front side by night.jpg, Front side of the hotel File:Yanggakdo International Hotel room 1.jpg, Standard-sized twin room

References

External links

*The hotel's promotional video, recorded by a guest in August 2011:
''Yanggakdo International Hotel'' picture album
at

Naenara Naenara () is the official web portal of the North Korean government. It was the first website in North Korea, and was created in 1996. The portal's categories include politics, tourism, music, foreign trade, arts, press, information technology, ...