North Korea is to open up a golf course where Kim Jong-il had a quite unbelievable success to foreign players.
In a surprise move by the reclusive country, amateur players from around the world have been promised “friendship” for taking part in a tournament promoted by Pyongyang’s National Tourism Association.
No specific details have been released, other than the tournament will be held in either spring or autumn and foreign participants are invited to try attractions including “an underwater golf course, archery ground and boating ground”.
Simon Cockerell, general manager of Koryo Tours, which organised excursions to North Korea before the pandemic, told Seoul-based NK News he believed the concept is largely “aspirational”, rather than a major push towards golf tourism.
“Almost nobody in North Korea plays golf and hardly any tourists play when they are there,” he said.
Incredible success
Despite the lack of national enthusiasm for the sport, Kim Jong-un’s father was a legendary player, state media once claimed – so talented that he scored an incredible 11 holes-in-one the first time he picked up a club at the Pyongyang Golf Course.
There is little evidence Kim Jong-un inherited his father’s apparent passion for the game. As a teenager living in Switzerland, he reportedly took up basketball in an attempt to grow taller, and was known for his temper and trash talk on the court.
Although he is said to have a private golf course at one of his mansions east of Pyongyang, experts analysing satellite photos believe Kim Jong-un may have risked damaging the fairway earlier this year by using it as a launchsite for his country’s most powerful intercontinental ballistic missile, the Hwasong-18.
The use of the actual putting green on the secluded grounds of the mansion for such an audacious purpose was never officially confirmed.
Pyongyang’s main golf course was reportedly financed by ethnic Koreans in Japan and built in the early 1980s. It was officially opened in 1987 to celebrate the 75th birthday of the country’s founder and the current leader’s grandfather, Kim Il Sung.
Today, the course is said to cover an area of 196 hectares and can accommodate as many as 200 players, which could include overseas arrivals providing North Korea’s severe Covid-19 border restrictions are lifted.
In reality, the first foreign visitors are more likely to be on tour buses from neighbouring China.
Cheong Seong-chang, of the Center for North Korea Studies at the Sejong Institute, told AFP recent signs indicate “that Chinese tourism to North Korea will gradually resume in the future”.