DPRK: Flower Show

After the concert we moved on to the flower show. This proved to be the sole time in the whole trip that we were allowed to be out of the direct sight of our guides. It was a strange affair. We were escorted into the ground floor of the building housing the event. There we were told to take the escalator to the next floor where the main event was held and work our way through and round the exhibition until we reached the far doors where we would be met again.

It was certainly popular, filled with crowds of Koreans, mostly in their best clothes, all looking at the hundreds of displays. Of course the displays were what made it such a bizarre event. There were exactly two varieties of flower on display – the purple orchid known as Kimilsungia and the red begonia known as Kimjongilia. Here and there there were very small splashes of white but clearly set to show off the contrasting red and purple in front of them. The displays themselves ranged in size from tabletop to hall-filling but had a startling uniformity of theme. Probably ninety percent of them were models of the Great Leader’s birthplace, surrounded by oceans of those two flowers. The few that were different were models of the country's various revolutionary monuments surrounded by those two flowers.

I was first at the exit door, where I found one of our guides waiting. I asked him a few questions about the exhibition, questions which I also researched independently later. Everyone, I was told, expressed their great love of the two leaders by entering displays. The smaller ones were from companies and individuals working in DPRK, the enormous one in the middle (at least twenty yards long and twelve wide) would be from a combination of Government ministries and organisations.

Translated by my independent research this comes out as “if you are a company that wants to go on doing business in DPRK you had damned well better enter a stand” and “if you are a Government employee who wants to find himself moving up instead of out, ditto”.

By the time we got out twilight was falling and we had just time to drive out into Pyongyang’s main square for photographs of the square, the Study House and, across the river, the Juche Monument, before heading off for dinner.

After dinner, I sat in the bar and wrote a poem about the Flower Show.

Flower Show

There are orchids of one type
And begonias of another
And they fill the halls with colours,
Though those colours number - two!
You may search from end to end
If you're looking for some other,
But this purple and this red
Are the only ones on view.
It's a flower show with a difference;
It's a duo of varieties;
One named for each leader
The Dear One and the Great.
A tulip or a daffodil
Would be an impropriety,
Such a thing in such a flower show
Would be to desecrate.
Kimilsungia, Kimjongilia
Which are counted by the ton
Surround models of the birthplace
Of the leader - Mangyindae
Or occasionally a statue -
A revolutionary one -
Being all that all the entrants
Are permitted to display.