Hoeryong

Every year on the tenth lunar month, a trade expedition was sent to Hoi Ryong (Hui-ning in Chinese), a Korean border town, located on the bank of the Tumen River, southeast of Ninguta, where salt, rice, iron, cloth, paper, cattle, and horses were obtained.

Choi Hyok and his sister lost their parents in the 1990s, when more than 1m died of famine under Kim Jong-il's dictatorship. They were reduced to begging in the streets of Hoeryong in one of the poorest parts of North Korea, on the border with China.

Keep going west and you’re ultimately in the Tuman River Area, and Hoeryong border city, opposite its Chinese counterpart, Jilin. Hoeryong is known for its white apricots and as the centre of this province’s metallurgical and coal industries. Hoeryong is the base for many monuments to Kim Jong Suk, revolutionary anti-Japanese fighter[…]

Mr. Ahn Myong-Chol was a prison guard at Camp 22 in Hoeryong and a driver at the camps. He was there between 1990 and 1994. He is the one who reported that prisoners had been used for human experimentation inside the camps.

When Jeon Geum-ju was a girl in Hoeryong, a depressing mining town at the very northern reaches of North Korea, she used to sing at school about the country’s supreme leader.

In 1996, Mr. Ji was 13, his parents’ eldest son, living in a mining village near the city of Hoeryong in northern North Korea.