Inside North Korea’s Abandoned Hotel of Doom

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PYONGYANG is the most secretive city on the planet and if you want to visit, then tough luck - the country’s borders are slammed shut.

It's in the heart of North Korea and getting there is pretty much impossible at the moment.

In fact, the closest most of us will get to seeing what’s going on there is by checking it out on Google Earth and from above, it looks like any other sprawling city.

That is until you get to one building in particular.

Ryugyong Hotel is the tallest building in North Korea. It stands unfinished and empty, as it has done for decades.

Above: Ryugyong Hotel is a truly unique skyscraper in Pyongyang and is the tallest building in North Korea.

Construction began in 1987 and to this day, not a single guest has ever stayed there. In fact, until its doors eventually open for business, you weren’t meant to see inside this building at all and getting access would be insanely difficult. 

But not impossible.

Inside the world's most secretive skyscraper

Simon Cockerell has a pretty unique job. He's a tour guide for Koryo Tours and has been to North Korea hundreds of times, leading groups of tourists.

“This contact of mine knew somebody in the construction company and said that he could arrange for me to go and visit (Ryugyong Hotel). We had a walk around the site and then they suggested, 'ok, thanks for coming' and I said, look, no, let’s go inside and let’s go to the top. Cue a bunch of phone calls, a lot of waiting around and eventually it happened.”

Simon has only ever been inside Ryugyong Hotel once. No one else in the world has managed to gain his level of access, let alone visually document its interior.

He managed to get some truly remarkable photos which he’s shared directly with The B1M.

“We had a big walk around the lower floors and then up to the top to the observation deck which is on the 99th floor. It was fascinating, one of the most interesting things I’ve seen but it was alienatingly high."

"From other tall buildings in North Korea you can see people but this building was so high, everything sort of looked like it was a matte painting. I had to have an argument about being able to take photos and so on but yeah it was terrific. I would obviously do it again in a heartbeat and yet have never been able to go back and neither has anyone else."

Above: Photos taken by Simon Cockerell, one of the only visitors to ever go inside Ryugyong Hotel.

Come 2020 the nation closed its borders and shut everyone out. Since then, North Korea has made lots of noise on the global stage and yet its tallest building has remained as it always has - quiet.

In fact, since construction started on Ryugyong Hotel, we’ve seen the invention of the world wide web, Nelson Mandela was freed from prison and the Berlin Wall came tumbling down.

And while there are lots of skyscrapers that never officially opened, it’s difficult not to be intrigued by a skyscraper, 40 years in the making, in the world’s most secretive nation.

Above: Ryugyong Hotel stands 330 metres tall over the city of Pyongyang.

Pyongyang's concrete love affair

Calvin’s an architect based in Singapore - he runs a design practice called Spatial Anatomy and teaches at the Singapore University of Technology and Design.

But importantly, he also volunteers for the Choson Exchange, a programme which supports and teaches North Koreans across a variety of disciplines.

“Ryugyong was a hotel that was designed to basically compete with the then tallest hotel in the world that was undergoing construction which was The Stamford Hotel in Singapore. It was built by a South Korean construction company so I think rumour has it that Pyongyang wanted its own world’s tallest hotel and that was really the genesis of Ryugyong Hotel.”

It’s thought the design might be based on a much smaller, luxury hotel opened nearly 150km away from Ryugyong in 1986.

Above: It's thought Ryugyong Hotel's design might be based on the North Korean Hyangsan Hotel. Courtesy David Clayton Ellsworth.

What you might notice in the photos we've shown you so far is that the structure is made entirely from reinforced concrete. Most modern skyscrapers feature steel because of its incredible strength to weight ratio. It allows you to build tall and slender towers, minimising the structure’s footprint.

But not here and there’s an important reason for that.

“If you look at most of the construction in North Korea, buildings are made of concrete - the entire industry is largely based on that material. It has got to do with the technology transfer between the communist states in Europe and the DPRK."

"So for example, East German engineers and architects were involved in the early city projects and planning in Pyongyang so what it did was to leave a legacy of prefab panels and in-situ concrete construction methods”, Chua told us.

While the relative high cost of steel has definitely played its part, Pyongyang is built on concrete. It’s a material the nation is incredibly familiar with and so of course Ryugyong Hotel would follow suit.

Concrete gives the building this intimidating aesthetic but the nature of the material is actually a key reason Ryugyong is such a crazy shape.

Aside from trying to make it look like a mountain, an important symbol of power in North Korea, it had to have a really wide base.

Unsurprisingly, concrete is incredibly heavy so any structure built entirely from the material will have weight issues. The fix here was to create a massive footprint and taper the design upwards to avoid a top heavy tower.

It’s 330 metres tall and features three wings, each measuring 100 metres long and 18 metres wide. The truncated cone at the tip of the structure is then 40 metres wide.

Building a supertall pencil thin tower entirely from concrete would be challenging. The material is incredibly strong but not particularly tensile. Without steel support, it could give into the wind or collapse under its own weight distribution.

But when you look inside, it’s grand, eerie and impressive all at the same time.

Courtesy of Simon Cockerell.

What next for the Hotel of Doom?

Come the early nineties, the Soviet Union dissolved and North Korea fell into a period of economic crisis. The nation endured the ‘Arduous March’, a period of severe famine and economic troubles.

Construction of this great mountainous hotel ground to a halt, right up until 2008. Three years later, the exterior was finished, with a grand opening planned for 2013 but that never actually happened.

Looking from a distance, you’d be mistaken for thinking it’s ready for guests. The exterior features an enormous LED screen used to show film clips and propaganda supporting North Korea’s leadership.

But seemingly, the inside is a different story.

Above: Courtesy of Simon Cockerell.

The latest murmurings claim Ryugyong could become a casino - that’s if an external investor is willing to pay for construction of the hotel's interior.

It’s claimed Kim Jong Un has signed off on the plan that could see this tower become Pyongyang’s answer to Vegas.

But there’s a reason rumours are just rumours, as Cockerell explains.

“Foreign investment in North Korea doesn’t exist that much because it’s usually not legal so not every country would be able to put money in. There are some big companies from other countries that might be able to do that but a 105 storey casino sounds weird."

"There is a casino in Pyongyang already - it’s one room because Koreans aren’t allowed to gamble so the demand for gambling is quite low. So is there much of a demand among the not that many tourists for gambling on that scale? No, of course not.”

Historic poverty, oppression and the current political climate mean North Korea’s foreign investment options are limited.

As recently as 2023, the BBC reported North Koreans were facing some of the harshest conditions the nation’s people have ever had to live through following the closure of the borders in 2020. But the North Korean embassy in London claimed testimonies were faked by anti-DPRK forces.

Back in 2012 it looked like the Kempinski Group might run the hotel but that never came to fruition.

So will the Ryugyong Hotel ever open its doors? Quite possibly. As Chua explains, it’s not like it’ll be knocked down now.

“It’s massive, right? If you’re talking about sustainability, it wouldn’t make sense to knock down this building because so much concrete has been utilised to build this monumental structure so from that sustainability angle, I think it only makes sense for this building to stay for another 50 to 100 years.”

While North Korea’s borders are currently on a firm lockdown the nation does seem to be preparing for visitors.

Talk about the future of Ryugyong is heating up and a massive Wonsan-Kalma holiday resort has been built. The new beachside development is supposedly based on Benidorm, after Kim Jong Un sent emissaries there for a visit.

Although Cockerell assures us that’s highly unlikely and nothing more than the tabloids doing what tabloids do best.

The Wonsan-Kalma resort opened this summer but we have no idea who its target audience is. Whether North Korea’s borders will reopen for the resort or if it’s planned as an internal travel destination, your guess is as good as ours.

As always, the nation remains an unpredictable, closed book but thanks to these incredible images, the inside of the Ryugyong Hotel is slightly less of a mystery.

Although what lies in wait for the future of North Korea’s abandoned supertall is still anyone’s guess.

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Additional footage and images courtesy of Simon Cockerell, Koryo Tours, Donny Ferguson, ITV, CGTNEurope, BBC News, Tour PR (프로투어), mofe, Vlaicu Sorin, Everything Science, Christophe95, David Clayton Ellsworth, ABC News, The Guardian, WION, Firstpost, (stephan) and Amazon MGM Studios.

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