One Free Korea OneFreeKorea freekorea.us home faq about news blogs plan-b camps interviews google earth

Ghost City: 39.75N, 126.31E

Posted by Joshua on February 10, 2007 at 11:44 pm · Filed under Google Earth

soot.JPGBy the green river, there is a grey city.  The city, I infer from this map, is called Tokchon, and it lies on the headwaters of the Taedong, above Pyongyang, and above the slave-worked coal mines of Camps 14 and 18. 

The city is coated in soot, a deathly blanket reminiscent of scenes we haven’t seen since the fall of Ceausescu’s Romania.   Click for a full-size image.

Search the streets for signs of life, and you will find few.  I searched for five minutes before I even saw a truck.  In places, the shadows seem to show that the buildings are vacant. 

soot2.JPGThere are other cities like this, too.  If you have Google Earth, pay a visit to 42.5N, 140.3E, and you will find this place.

 

Mark said,

February 11, 2007 @ 2:35 am

Uncanny. It’s like one of the cities in Half-Life 2.

OneFreeKorea » said,

February 12, 2007 @ 10:41 am

[…] Ghost City: 39.75N, 126.31E […]

kdehead said,

February 13, 2007 @ 6:04 am

in the first city , Tokchon, if you look to the left of the stadium, there looks to be some sort of crowd activity.

google maps link:
http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&q=39.75N,+126.31E&ie=UTF8&z=18&ll=39.760453,126.31645&spn=0.001662,0.004705&t=k&om=1

Joshua said,

February 13, 2007 @ 6:07 am

You’re right. How did you get that kind of resolution? Amazing.

Maybe it’s one of those illegal markets.

kdehead said,

February 13, 2007 @ 7:59 am

could well be a illegal market alright. note the building to the left of the stadium, and how the crowds are going into it or congregating around it. but your initial point about ghost towns is valid - just looking around the rest of the town you can see that its practically deserted.

could these ghost towns be a sign of the effects of the famine in the 90s?

Joshua said,

February 13, 2007 @ 10:39 am

Yes. I think the telling part is the apparent breakdown of much of the industry and the apparently vacant buildings along the main drag. The town appears to be in the advanced stages of being stripped of everything salvageable. About 25 miles south of there, another factory is still churning out smoke. The ones in these towns look like stripped out hulks.

You have to wonder what those people are living on.

OneFreeKorea » Mysterious Pits in a North Korean Field, 39.944 N, 125.471 E : Image Analysts Wanted said,

February 13, 2007 @ 2:42 pm

[…] Reader “kdehead” dropped a comment on another post below, with a link to a Google Earth image of a field near of the “ghost cities” I’d described in this post.  Here is part of the image he links (click for full size): […]

OneFreeKorea » Holocaust Now: Looking Down Into Hell at Camp 22 said,

February 18, 2007 @ 2:10 pm

[…] They cannot read foreign newspapers, listen to foreign broadcasts, possess cell phones or radios that can pick up unauthorized broadcasts, express unauthorized opinions, or travel abroad without fear of entering this gate. The state owns everything, including the meager rations they grow, and on which they live. Still, for farmers in North Korea, survival is a little easier than it is for workers in the blighted factory towns where unemployed survivors of the Great Famine still live by stripping the ruins of copper wire. Just the same, one suspects that the farmers know what’s good for them.  Most likely, they stay away from the fence, keep their eyes on the soil, and never mention it. […]

OneFreeKorea » Holocaust Now: Looking Down Into Hell at Camp 22 said,

March 16, 2007 @ 9:20 am

[…] They cannot read foreign newspapers, listen to foreign broadcasts, possess cell phones or radios that can pick up unauthorized broadcasts, express unauthorized opinions, or travel abroad without fear of entering this gate. The state owns everything, including the meager rations they grow, and on which they live. Still, for farmers in North Korea, survival is a little easier than it is for workers in the blighted factory towns where unemployed survivors of the Great Famine still live by stripping the ruins of copper wire. Just the same, one suspects that the farmers know what’s good for them. Most likely, they stay away from the fence, keep their eyes on the soil, and never mention it. […]

OneFreeKorea » The North Korean Air Force by Google Earth said,

April 30, 2007 @ 3:24 pm

[…] [Update:  Welcome Weekly Standard readers.  Please take note of some of the other North Korea Google Earth tours here:  the concentration camps at Camp 22 (of gas chamber infamy) and Camp 16 (the site of a recent mass escape), North Korea’s “ghost cities,” and Kim Jong Il’s palace complex northeast of Pyongyang, which comes with its own “pyramid scheme.”] […]

OneFreeKorea » “Famine in North Korea:” An Interactive Review (1 of 3) said,

August 22, 2007 @ 9:23 pm

[…] Let’s return to the problem of using an agricultural economy’s model for an industrial economy, because the concentration of people away from their food sources poses what I’ll call the problem of the “goners.”  In any famine, people wander away from their homes in search of food, but the problem is greatly concentrated for large numbers of people concentrated in factory towns like this one, as opposed to smaller concentrations of people surrounded by other farming areas.  According to Andrew Natsios, “goners” was a grim expression aid workers applied to wandering famine refugees few were likely to survive.  Defector Yomiko Chiba vividly described the arrival of scores of goners in Sinuiju in 1995.  They wandered in from the countryside and began showing up dead on the town’s streets, which concerned local officials.  Chiba was a teacher, so the regime mobilized her and her students to collect and bury cartfulls of goners of all ages and both genders.  Natsios also wrote of having witnessed mass burials of famine victims in unmarked graves and described defector accounts of daily collections of corpses at railroad stations.  […]

jsternsp said,

July 7, 2009 @ 9:05 am

If you look in the hills surrounding the “ghost” city on both sides of the river, you will see numerous grave mounds arranged in a haphazard manner. On the south side of the river I noticed grave mounds on hillsides that seemed to be terraced for agriculture. It seems odd that one would choose to bury someone in an area suitable for growing crops during a famine. Maybe they were desperate or it didn’t matter because the city was being abandoned.

There are also strange structures in the fields that look like trenches inside a square. (rice paddy?) Some of the trenches are covered in snow and some are not, which means they may be recent work. Why would you be digging up part of a rice paddy during the middle of winter? 39.4544N, 126.1710E.

Also what appears to be a prison camp at 39.4504N, 126.1440E.

Steve C said,

June 28, 2010 @ 2:36 am

Had a little look about, noticed this: http://maps.google.co.uk/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=39.762739++126.308851&sll=53.800651,-4.064941&sspn=12.635315,39.331055&ie=UTF8&ll=39.767364,126.315828&spn=0.002004,0.004801&t=h&z=18

Probably a courtyard, the dots could be people. All rather disturbing, looking at North Korea like this.

ayana said,

June 27, 2011 @ 7:48 am

Really horrifying!

RSS feed for comments on this post · TrackBack URI

Leave a Comment