The history of North Korea

North Korea occupies the northern half of the Korean peninsula, a land that for most of its history shared one culture, one language and, from the tenth century, one state with the south. The ancient kingdom of Goguryeo, centred on Pyongyang, and later the Goryeo and Joseon dynasties ruled the north before Japan annexed all of Korea in 1910. At the end of the Second World War the peninsula was divided between Soviet and American occupation zones, and in 1948 the Democratic People's Republic of Korea was founded in the north under Kim Il Sung. After the devastating Korean War of 1950 to 1953, his family built one of the most closed and tightly controlled states in the world, and it has been ruled by three generations of Kims, a nuclear-armed dynasty that in 2024 formally abandoned the goal of reunification.

People have lived on the Korean peninsula for several hundred thousand years. Pottery appeared around 8000 BCE, and the Neolithic Jeulmun culture, named after its comb-patterned vessels, lived by fishing, hunting and gathering along the coasts and rivers. Rice farming, bronze and stone dolmens spread in the Mumun period from about 1500 BCE. Korean tradition traces the nation to Dangun, said to have founded the kingdom of Gojoseon in 2333 BCE, a date with no historical support but still celebrated in both Koreas. North Korea has gone further, announcing in 1993 that it had found Dangun's tomb near Pyongyang, a claim archaeologists outside the country reject.

Gojoseon itself is real. Chinese texts record it as a state in the north of the peninsula and southern Manchuria by the fourth century BCE. In 108 BCE armies of the Han dynasty destroyed it and set up four commanderies, the most important of which, Lelang, was centred near Pyongyang. Excavated Lelang tombs, full of Chinese lacquerware and seals, show how deeply Chinese culture entered the north.

Out of the peoples of the north rose Goguryeo, which by the fourth century CE had driven the last Chinese commandery out and become the strongest of the Three Kingdoms, alongside Baekje in the south-west and Silla in the south-east. Under Gwanggaeto the Great around 400 it ruled a vast territory stretching deep into Manchuria, and in 427 his son Jangsu moved the capital to Pyongyang. Goguryeo's painted tombs, now a World Heritage site, show hunting scenes, dancers and the four guardian beasts. The kingdom repeatedly defeated the armies of China's Sui and Tang dynasties, but in 668 it fell to an alliance of Tang and Silla. Silla then pushed the Tang out and ruled the south of the peninsula, while in the north a former Goguryeo general founded Balhae in 698, which lasted until the Khitans destroyed it in 926. North Korean historians treat Goguryeo and Balhae as the true line of Korean statehood, while South Korean scholarship has traditionally stressed unified Silla.

In 918 Wang Geon founded Goryeo, from which the name Korea comes, and by 936 he had reunited the peninsula. His capital, Kaesong, now lies just inside North Korea. Goryeo was a Buddhist kingdom famous for its celadon pottery and for the woodblocks of the Tripitaka Koreana, and its printers used movable metal type by the thirteenth century. From 1231 the Mongol Empire invaded repeatedly, and after decades of resistance Goryeo became a subordinate ally of the Yuan dynasty until the mid-fourteenth century.

In 1392 the general Yi Seong-gye overthrew Goryeo and founded the Joseon dynasty, which ruled until 1897 from Hanyang, today's Seoul. Joseon made Neo-Confucianism its state ideology and accepted a tributary relationship with the Ming dynasty. King Sejong promulgated the Korean alphabet, Hangul, in 1446. The Japanese invasions of 1592 to 1598, defeated with Ming help and by Admiral Yi Sun-sin's navy, and the Manchu invasions of 1627 and 1636 devastated the country, after which Joseon became a tributary of the Qing dynasty and turned inward. The northern provinces, poorer and colder, were looked down upon by the southern aristocracy, and the north saw a major rebellion under Hong Gyeong-nae in 1811 and 1812.

In the late nineteenth century Joseon was pressed open by Japan, which imposed the unequal Treaty of Ganghwa in 1876. In 1866 the American ship General Sherman was burned on the Taedong River near Pyongyang, an event North Korean propaganda later claimed Kim Il Sung's great-grandfather took part in. After defeating China in 1895 and Russia in 1905, the Empire of Japan made Korea a protectorate and annexed it in 1910. Colonial rule was harsh. Peaceful demonstrations for independence on 1 March 1919 were met with mass arrests and killings, and in the 1930s and 1940s Japan tried to erase Korean identity, forcing Koreans to take Japanese names and worship at Shinto shrines. Hundreds of thousands were taken as forced labourers, and many women were coerced into military brothels as so-called comfort women. Japan also built heavy industry, mines and hydroelectric dams in the north, which became the more industrialised half of the peninsula.

Many Koreans fought Japan from exile. Among them was Kim Song-ju, born near Pyongyang in 1912, who took the name Kim Il Sung and led a small guerrilla unit in Manchuria within a Chinese Communist-led army. Pursued by the Japanese, he crossed into the Soviet Union around 1940, where he served as an officer in a Soviet brigade.

The Soviet Union declared war on Japan on 8 August 1945 and its troops entered northern Korea. To stop them occupying the whole peninsula, American officers proposed dividing it at the 38th parallel, and Moscow agreed. Japan's surrender on 15 August ended colonial rule. In the north, Soviet authorities backed Kim Il Sung, who returned in September 1945, and his allies took over local people's committees. A sweeping land reform in 1946 confiscated the estates of landlords and Japanese owners, industry was nationalised, and many landowners, Christians and opponents fled south. The United States, meanwhile, occupied the south.

Plans for a single Korean government collapsed with the onset of the Cold War. After United Nations-supervised elections were held only in the south, the Republic of Korea was proclaimed in Seoul in August 1948, and on 9 September the Democratic People's Republic of Korea was proclaimed in Pyongyang, with Kim Il Sung as premier. Each claimed to be the only legitimate government of all Korea. Soviet troops left at the end of 1948. The history of the southern state from this point is told in the History of South Korea.

With the approval of Joseph Stalin and the support of Mao Zedong, North Korean forces invaded the South on 25 June 1950, starting the Korean War. They took Seoul within days and drove the South Korean army and its American allies into a small perimeter around Busan. A United Nations force led by the United States landed at Incheon in September, recaptured Seoul, crossed the 38th parallel and took Pyongyang in October, advancing towards the Chinese border. In late 1950 hundreds of thousands of Chinese troops entered the war and pushed the UN forces back south. From mid-1951 the front stabilised near the original dividing line, and two years of bloody positional fighting followed while negotiators argued, chiefly over the return of prisoners.

An armistice signed at Panmunjom on 27 July 1953 halted the fighting and created a demilitarised zone, but no peace treaty has ever been signed. Millions of Koreans had been killed, wounded or displaced, and families were divided by the new border. American bombing had flattened nearly every city and town in the north, and the experience became the core of North Korean state memory and its hostility to the United States.

Rebuilding with Soviet, Chinese and East European aid, North Korea grew fast in the 1950s and 1960s, and for a time its economy outperformed the South's. Kim Il Sung used the war's aftermath to destroy every rival group in the ruling Workers' Party. Leaders of the southern communists were tried and executed, and in August 1956 Kim defeated an attempt by pro-Chinese and pro-Soviet factions to criticise his personality cult, after which they were purged. Mass campaigns such as the Chollima Movement of 1958 mobilised workers for ever higher targets, agriculture was collectivised, and every citizen was assigned a hereditary class status, songbun, according to family loyalty to the regime.

Kim developed the ideology of Juche, or self-reliance, and steered between Moscow and Beijing during the Sino-Soviet split. A personality cult of extraordinary intensity surrounded him, and the 1972 constitution made him president. The state remained militant towards the South: commandos attacked the presidential Blue House in Seoul in January 1968, the American intelligence ship Pueblo was seized days later, and in the 1970s and 1980s North Korean agents kidnapped Japanese and South Korean citizens, bombed a South Korean delegation in Rangoon in 1983 and blew up a Korean Air airliner in 1987. From the 1970s the economy stagnated under heavy foreign debt and military spending, and in 1980 Kim's son Kim Jong Il was openly named his successor.

The dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 ended subsidised oil and trade, and China also began demanding hard currency. Both Koreas joined the United Nations in 1991. Kim Il Sung died on 8 July 1994, and his son succeeded him as the economy collapsed. Floods in the mid-1990s turned food shortages into a famine, known officially as the Arduous March, which killed an estimated 240,000 to 420,000 people, with some estimates far higher. The state's food distribution system broke down, and ordinary North Koreans survived through private markets and smuggling across the Chinese border, changes that the regime has tolerated and periodically tried to curb ever since.

Kim Jong Il governed under the slogan of Songun, military first. A 1994 agreement with the United States froze North Korea's plutonium programme in exchange for fuel and reactors, and in June 2000 Kim met the South Korean president Kim Dae-jung in Pyongyang, the first summit between the two states, which led to a joint industrial zone at Kaesong and tourism at Mount Kumgang. The 1994 deal collapsed in 2002, North Korea left the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and on 9 October 2006 it carried out its first nuclear test, followed by a second in 2009. Six-party talks involving China, Japan, Russia, the United States and the two Koreas failed. In 2010 the sinking of the South Korean warship Cheonan, which an international investigation attributed to a North Korean torpedo, and the shelling of Yeonpyeong Island raised tension sharply.

Kim Jong Il died in December 2011, and his youngest son, Kim Jong Un, then in his late twenties, took over. He consolidated power by executing his uncle Jang Song-thaek in 2013, and his half-brother Kim Jong-nam was murdered with a nerve agent at Kuala Lumpur airport in 2017. Kim accelerated the weapons programmes, carrying out four more nuclear tests between 2013 and 2017, the last apparently thermonuclear, and in 2017 testing missiles capable of reaching the United States. In 2014 a United Nations Commission of Inquiry concluded that the state had committed crimes against humanity, including extermination, enslavement, torture and starvation, and estimated that 80,000 to 120,000 people were held in political prison camps.

In 2018 Kim turned to diplomacy, meeting the South Korean president Moon Jae-in three times and holding the first ever summit with an American president, Donald Trump, in Singapore on 12 June 2018. A second summit in Hanoi in February 2019 broke down over sanctions and disarmament. From 2020 North Korea sealed its borders against COVID-19 almost completely. At the end of 2023 Kim declared that reunification was no longer possible, and in 2024 the state designated South Korea a separate and hostile state and demolished the Arch of Reunification in Pyongyang.

Kim drew closer to Moscow. During Vladimir Putin's visit to Pyongyang in June 2024 the two countries concluded a Treaty on Comprehensive Strategic Partnership, and from October 2024 more than ten thousand North Korean soldiers were sent to fight for Russia against Ukraine in the Kursk region, a deployment both governments confirmed in April 2025. The Ninth Congress of the Workers' Party in February 2026 re-elected Kim as general secretary, and in May 2026 the constitution was amended to describe South Korea as a hostile state and remove references to a shared Korean heritage.