On October 10 each year, the establishment of the Workers’ Party of Korea (WPK) is commemorated in North Korea. Leader Kim Jong Un chose the occasion this year to order renovations for the Kumsusan Palace of the Sun, where the bodies of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il lie preserved.
“On October 10, the Great Leader [Kim Jong Un] handed down an order to renovate the Kumsusan Palace of the Sun to make it an even more splendidly great holy site for Juche (national ideology of self-reliance). There was also a campaign to collect loyalty funds from the Party organizations for renovations to the arboretum connected to the palace,” said a Pyongyang-based source on October 23.
“The national primary-grade and lower-level cell organizations are taking part in the campaign. The central authorities are telling people to ‘give with a good heart’ and there are some who are contributing 10,000 KPW and others who are giving 100,000 KPW.”
The North Korean authorities built the approximately 991,735 square meter Kumsusan Palace of the Sun arboretum (formerly called the Kumsusan Memorial Palace) in 1998. Details on how much larger the arboretum will become following the renovations remain scarce. The authorities may decide on the extent of the plans after seeing how much money can be raised, the source said.
The Kumsusan Palace of the Sun, which is located at the base of Mt Kumsu in Misan-dong (neighborhood), Taesong district – about 8 kilometers from Pyongyang’s city center – was once known as Kumsusan Assembly Hall, Kim Il Sung’s office. The building was then expanded and renovated.
The regime undertook a large construction project to expand and renovate the Kumsusan Assembly Hall into the Kumsusan Memorial Palace with the intention to place Kim Il Sung’s body inside it for a period of one year after his death in 1994. According to North Korean defector Hwang Jang Yop, a former WPK secretary, a massive amount of money went into the construction, reaching upwards of 890 million US dollars at the time.
North Korea changed the name of the building to the Kumsusan Palace of the Sun in 2011 after Kim Jong Il’s death and conducted another round of renovations, including the addition of marble pathways and grass on the square in front of the building.
“It’s not clear why this recent order for renovations was made,” said a separate source in Pyongyang close to the matter.
“However, the order appears to be connected to attempts to strengthen the justification for Kim Jong Un’s succession to power and reinforce the image of Kim as a ‘leader who puts the legacies of his predecessors into practice,” he said, explaining that the regime is also aiming to increase loyalty toward the Kim Jong Un government.
That being said, it is not clear whether the regime’s strategy to increase loyalty will succeed. WPK officials are reportedly voicing complaints over the order to contribute to the fund.
“During a meal with new employees on October 10, the head of a management office for the Pochon County Historical Site in Ryanggang Province asked rhetorically when the ‘loyalty fund’ campaigns would end,” a source in Ryanggang Province reported.
North Korean authorities, however, appear ready to deal out severe punishment to those who make “impure” comments. “The aforementioned manager was taken away somewhere by a county Ministry of State Security truck soon after he expressed discontent with the Party’s order,” he said.
