Pyongyang Metro Real or Fake?

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Amazing video - a must watch! Confirms my suspicions the metro passengers are traveling for acting purposes and not genuinely commuting.    You even get to see that prototype train the DPRK built.

Is the Pyongyang Metro Real or Fake? You Decide.


"Visitors to the DPRK often wonder whether the country's capital, Pyongyang, is actually an elaborate set with thousands of actors walking the city's tree-lined boulevards portraying civilians, police and school children. For many, it is difficult to accept Pyongyang's role as a showcase for the image North Korea wishes to project, and some visitors subscribe to the more insidious theory that it is all an elaborate stage show being manipulated from behind-the-scenes.

Pyongyang's 16-stop, marble-lined metro system, with its elaborate mosaics and golden statues of Kim Il Sung, is often the center of such speculation. Some have claimed to have witnessed "actors" exiting the metro only to turn right back around and go for another ride. Others have insisted that since visitors often only see two or three stations, that the other stops listed on the metro's official map actually do not exist.

In August, YPT's North Korea Tour Manager Rowan Beard rode through the entire Pyongyang Metro system and captured the experience on camera. Is it real or fake? You decide!"

[busman]

Why do you think those people are not commuters?

[snoggle]

I've read several different reports about the Pyonyang Metro. I've never seen a suggestion that it was somehow fake. One of the reports was from another transport group by a very well travelled chap who visited North Korea. Even accepting that such visits are obviously controlled and there are restrictions he was able to take photos in the street and on the Metro. He made no comments about thinking any aspect of his visit was somehow faked or staged or that the people he saw were actors. They may very well be privileged members of N Korea's society and not representative of the life endured by the rest of the population but that's another issue altogether.

Even allowing for the apparent idiosyncracies in a dictatorship I struggle to see how a 2 line Metro system can be maintained as an "illusion" for the purposes of foiling outsiders. Who on earth would care? If we want to wander off into the world of speculation then there are all sorts of rumours about "hidden" parts of the Metro that exist but never see public use. Those rumours also persist about the London Underground with the rumoured secret tube station under Buckingham Palace, the secret express tube line to RAF Northolt and other nonsenses.