Who ruled Pyongyang?

Pyongyang lies on the Taedong River in the north-west of the Korean peninsula, on a fertile plain about 50 kilometres from the Yellow Sea. Its name means "flat land", and the open country, the navigable river and the hills that guard the old city made it one of the oldest centres of power in Korea. It has been a royal capital several times, most notably of the kingdom of Goguryeo, and since 1948 it has been the capital of North Korea, rebuilt almost from nothing after the Korean War as a showcase of the state.

People lived on the Taedong plain in the Neolithic and Bronze Ages, and excavations around the city have uncovered large prehistoric villages and dolmens. Korean tradition links Pyongyang with the capital of the mythical founder Dangun, and the North Korean state has given that legend great prominence; most historians outside North Korea treat it as myth. On firmer ground, the city of Wanggeom-seong, at or near Pyongyang, was the capital of the late state of Gojoseon until armies of the Han dynasty conquered it in 108 BCE. Emperor Wu of Han then set up the Lelang Commandery here, and for four centuries Chinese officials and settlers governed the area; their brick tombs, lacquerware and seals have been excavated south of the river.

The rising Korean kingdom of Goguryeo destroyed Lelang in 313 and in 427 moved its own capital to Pyongyang. Goguryeo ruled much of Manchuria and northern Korea from here, and its painted tombs near the city are now a World Heritage site. In 668 the combined armies of Silla and the Tang dynasty captured the city and ended the kingdom. For more than two centuries Pyongyang lay in a thinly governed borderland until the founders of Goryeo restored it as their Western Capital in the early tenth century.

Under the Joseon dynasty, from 1392, Pyongyang was the chief city of the north-west and a centre of trade with China. Japanese invaders took it in 1592 during the Imjin War, and a Ming Chinese and Korean army recaptured it early in 1593. In 1866 the crew of an armed American merchant ship, the General Sherman, were killed when it was burned on the Taedong, an episode that hardened Korean suspicion of the West. The Battle of Pyongyang in 1894, during the First Sino-Japanese War, left much of the city in ruins. In the decades that followed, Protestant missionaries made it the most Christian city in Korea, sometimes called the Jerusalem of the East.

Under Japanese colonial rule from 1910, when it was known as Heijō, Pyongyang grew into an industrial city, with coal mines and factories nearby. It was also a centre of protest during the March First Movement of 1919.

When Japan surrendered in August 1945, Soviet troops entered the city and made it the headquarters of their occupation zone. Kim Il Sung was installed as leader, and in 1948 Pyongyang became the seat of the new Democratic People's Republic of Korea. During the Korean War UN and South Korean forces held the city from October to December 1950, and American bombing reduced most of it to rubble. It was rebuilt from 1953 with Soviet and Eastern Bloc help as a planned socialist capital of wide avenues, apartment blocks and monuments to the ruling family. Access to the city is tightly controlled, and residence there is a privilege reserved largely for those trusted by the state. Pyongyang has about three million inhabitants and is by far the largest city in North Korea.