opinion

Mangyongdae has been known as a place of great scenic beauty from olden times.

It was called thus as it commands a bird’s eye view of the kaleidoscopic variety of beautiful scenery. The name originally referred to Mangyong Hill.

Up on the hill, one can look down on the natural scenery in around 40 kilometres and the shape of the hill looks like an elaborate tower. So it has been called Mangyongdae since olden times.

It was in the 1860s that the family of President Kim Il Sung had settled at Mangyongdae.

At the time a landlord in Pyongyang built a grave keeper’s cottage to keep his mountains and graves at Mangyongdae. Kim Ung U, great-grandfather of the President, who lived in Jungsong-ri of Pyongyang, was so poor that he could hardly afford even a one-room straw-thatched house. So he decided to look after the mountains and graves of the landlord and moved to the grave keeper’s cottage at Mangyongdae.

The President  was born on April 15 1912 in the straw-thatched house, which was commonly seen in every part of the country during the years of tribulations when the Korean people lost their country and which was not conspicuous among other houses and had nothing special.

The main building has a small kitchen and two living rooms, with the outhouse comprising three small barns, the low attic standing on one side of the courtyard and jars in front of it. The relics in the kitchen and rooms, the plough and other farm implements, straw mat, noodle press, hollowed-out gourd with a hole at the top and others evoke unforgettable memories of the life of his family. 

Still many people visit this house revealing vivid traces of poverty, going through a small brushwood gate.

The gate tells many touching stories.

When members of his family said farewell to his grandfather and grandmother and left the house, they would walk out through the brushwood gate in high spirits, saying that they would return after liberating the country from Japanese military rule. But it was only President Kim Il Sung who returned. 

When he returned to Mangyongdae after liberating Korea 20 years after he left home and 40 years after the national ruin, his grandmother hugged him outside the brushwood gate and pounded him on the chest, saying: “How have you come back alone? Where did you leave your father and mother? Did you not want to return with them?”

Referring to his feelings at the time, the President recalled in his reminiscences With the Century: “With her heart bursting with such deep grief, what was my agony as I walked through the brushwood gate of my old home alone without bringing with me even the bones of my parents who were dead and lying in a far-off foreign land?

“After that, whenever I passed through the gate of someone else’s home, I would wonder how many members of the family had gone out through that gate and how many of them had returned.”

When they enter the old home at Mangyongdae through this brushwood gate, visitors can see farm implements, a plastered water jar, a distorted jar, a pair of worn-out millstones, a lampstand which seems to have been used for generations and other relics showing the poor life of the family members of Mangyongdae.

The historic relics not only show traces of hard labour.

Pervading each of them are the warm heart that they can live without money but they cannot without humanity and the patriotic soul of the family members of Mangyongdae who successfully overcame the tempests of the times by regarding love for the country and the people as their family tradition even in grinding poverty.

Kim Ku once visited the President’s old home at Mangyongdae after national liberation.

As he entered the house, the President’s grandfather Kim Po Hyon was knitting together millet stalks to make fence for the vegetable plot in a plain peasant’s dress as usual and his grandmother Ri Po Ik was choosing garlic seeds on the strip of level ground under the eaves before the kitchen. He was so impressed to see them work that he as ask them why the grandparents of the leader of a country were doing such rough works.

Kim Po Hyon answered that his grandson was the leader, but he was a peasant and that there was an old saying that “Farming is the mainstay of the country” and only when farmers do their job well, can the country led by him be administered well.

The President was born to such a patriotic and popular family and grew up to be a great revolutionary.

The dawn of the turn of the destiny of the DPRK people came up from this house.

The Korean revolution started from the day when the President went out of the brushwood gate of his old home and embarked on the 1 000-ri (250-mile) Journey for National Liberation and the Juche idea can trace its origin back to it.

So the DPRK people call his old home at Mangyongdae the “cradle of revolution” and habitually visit his old home at Mangyongdae in April every year.