Donggwangsan

Main facade of the Donggwangsan Palace, as viewed from Heroes' Square.

Donggwangsan (Menghean: 동광산 / 東光山; literally "mountain of eastern light") is a multi-story palace building in central Donggyŏng, Menghe. It serves as the official residence and workplace of the Chairman of the Supreme Council of Menghe, and the meeting site of the Supreme Council itself, in addition to hosting a number of supporting central government functions. "Donggwangsan" is sometimes used as a metonym for the Menghean central government.

The Donggwangsan Palace site has historically been used by a number of government buildings, dating back to the Mogryŏn-gu Fort established in the 5th century CE. The palace was destroyed and rebuilt a number of times between then and the present, with its most recent restoration taking place in 1964-1968. As such, the present building has a distinctly neo-traditional style, and features modern amenities like elevators and running water.

Location

The Donggwangsan Palace sits in the center of Donggyŏng, at the heart of the Old City district. It lies on the Northern Meridian Road, which runs through the city on a north-south axis, and faces Heroes' Square, a 200-by-500-meter plaza which marked the center of the Decembrist Revolution. Menghe's National Day parade runs southward along the Northern Meridian Road past the building's viewing stand, and the square is often used for public events.

By tradition, most palaces and large mansions in Menghe are built facing directly south, so that the facade is warmed by the sun during the summer months and cooled by the shade during the winter months. In its current form, Donggwangsan is an exception: it faces directly east. The Sinyi rulers chose this orientation for their 1885 reconstruction, as it faced the rising sun and thus symbolized national renewal; for this reason, it was also known as the Choyang ("facing the sun") palace.

History

The first government building to occupy the Donggwangsan site was built in the 5th century, during the Five States and Seven Fiefdoms period. After burning down Jangpyŏng, the former capital of Donghae State, the Tae invaders built a new fort on Mogryŏn-gu (Magnolia Hill) to guard the mouth of the Ryŏnggang river. The settlement which grew around it became Kimsŏng, later renamed Donggyŏng, and the fort was repurposed as the city's government center.

In 874 CE, during the Sung dynasty, the old castle building was replaced with a much larger palace complex, which would serve as the seat of the governor of Donghae Province. Magnolia Hill and the old castle foundation were leveled to form an artificial mound containing the governor's reception hall and court; his residence was located to the east, and various government buildings were spread throughout the rest of the rectangular palace complex.

The extent of this palace complex waxed and waned over the years, though the location of its central audience hall remained constant, with the artificial platform at its base surviving through the years. The first emperor of the Yi dynasty ordered that the private residence section be scaled down, and added a military-style wall to the outskirts. A fire leveled most of the buildings in 1612, and they were rebuilt over the next few years, with a major expansion to the private residence section in 1807.

The first palace to bear the name Donggwangsan, built in 1884.

During the Three States Period, Kimsŏng was declared the provisional capital of the State of Sinyi, and the Mogryŏn-gu palace was renovated to serve as the national center of government. After another fire swept through the area in 1884, the new Sinyi government ordered the construction of a new central government complex. The multi-story residence and administration hall built atop the squared-off hill was the first east-facing iteration, and the first to bear the name Donggwangsan; it bore a mix of Western and traditional architectural styles. The surrounding administration buildings were also rebuilt for a more streamlined government. After Menghe's unification in 1900, Donggwangsan was repurposed as the residence and office of the Prime Minister.

An electrical fire gutted the Donggwangsan building in 1911, leading to a second renovation. Leading Menghean architects joined a competition to submit new proposals; the winner was Chae Hyŏn-su, who proposed a castle-like structure with a three-story-tall extended stone base rising from the center of the old platform and an open plaza around it. The former site of the governor's personal residence was converted to a sprawling public garden, extending eastward in front of the new building's facade. After Kwon Chong-hoon's military coup, the Prime Minister's quarters became the official residence of the Emperor of Menghe.

The palace building was severely damaged by allied bombing in 1945; the stone second tier was partially collapsed, and the palace building on top of it was gutted by fire. The Allied Occupation government relocated its offices to the City Hall building in Sunju, where a new Presidential Palace was built for the Republic of Menghe government. A small operation in 1946 rebuilt the collapsed wall and shored up the upper structure, and a renovation effort was undertaken in 1955 with the intention of completing the building as a museum. It was suspended in 1956 due to a shortage of funds.

After declaring victory in the Menghean War of Liberation, Sun Tae-jun ordered a comprehensive effort to rebuild and expand Donggwangsan as the DPRM's new seat of government, hoping that the reconstruction of the long-incomplete structure would motivate efforts at the reconstruction of Menghe itself. Yang Man-su, a renowned prewar architect, produced the new design in collaboration with a committee of other architects. Construction began in February 1965 and proceeded at an expedited pace, ending in April 1967. The former Central Garden, which had been razed by fire and left as a marketplace, was converted to People's Square; a new garden was opened north of the palace, in a space once occupied by the palace grounds and stables.

Yang Man-su's version of the palace still stands today, with minor internal renovations. The headquarters building of the Menghean Socialist Party was added off the southern side in 1994, and an expanded visitor center was added off the northeastern corner in 1997.

Architecture

Donggwangsan as seen from the roof of the Socialist Party headquarters. This view also appears on the 1000-Won bill.

The current Donggwangsan palace follows a neo-traditional style, reminiscent in concept of the two previous iterations but differing in execution. The walls are made of gray stone, and are essentially Western in construction, though the rows of square columns along the sides are meant to be reminiscent of the wooden pillars used in older Menghean palaces. The roof is traditional in design, with upturned eaves; the light-blue tiles are typical of those used on Yi dynasty government buildings. A two-faced clock tower sits at each corner of the outer ring.

Compound Layout

The Donggwangsan Palace Complex consists of a roughly 400-by-400-meter square area which formerly comprised the northern portion of the Donghae Governor's Palace. It is enclosed by the Northern Meridian Avenue on the east, Liberation North Road to the north, Liberation South Road to the south, and the Palace Access Road to the west. The grounds are separated from the sidewalk by a combination of fences, buildings, and old and new stone walls.

Within the palace complex, the ground steadily slopes upward from the edges toward the center, reaching a height of nine meters above street level underneath the Donggwangsan complex. The stone foundations of the palace rise another two meters above the ground. This low hill, formerly named Mogryŏn-gu, is the "mountain" for which Donggwangsan is named. The palace itself occupies a roughly 200 by 150 meter plot, and is seven stories tall, not including the utility rooms in the attic. It is divided into an "outer ring," four stories tall, and an "inner ring," which begins on the outer ring's fourth floor and contains the Chairman's office and personal residence.

Palace Grounds

Map of the Donggwangsan palace grounds and the surrounding area of Donggyŏng.

The open-air grounds around the palace are divided into two sections. The visitor grounds are open to the general public on most days throughout the year, and can be accessed through three pedestrian security checkpoints. The internal grounds are off-limits to the general public, and are reserved for state employees with clearance to enter the public building. Despite what the name may suggest, the inner grounds are not at the center of the palace complex, but run along the eastern side and part of the southern side.

Most of the eastern section of the palace grounds has been taken up by a complex of central government buildings. The largest area of green space within the inner grounds lies in the south-center area, where Choe Sŭng-min established a traditional garden in the 1990s. This garden includes a "stone forest," or rockery, with large stones arranged artistically in the shape of mountains; several ponds stocked with carp; shaded pavilions; and a traditional Sindo shrine for performing rites.

Socialist Party Headquarters

The headquarters building of the Menghean Socialist Party was built on the northeastern corner of the palace grounds between 1990 and 1994, replacing the original automobile approach path to the palace's front gate. It is five stories tall, starting at street level, and has an internal floor area of 36,000 square meters. The bottom two stories facing the street are made of solid stone and angle up into the rest of the building, mimicking the nearby parade viewing stand; in addition to their aesthetic function, these secure the building against VBIED attacks. There are no doors facing the street, and the building can only be accessed from within the palace complex.

The Party Headquarters mainly hosts upper-middle-level staff meetings and routine administrative duties, rather than core leadership functions. The Politburo Steering Committee holds its meetings in the Blue Room of the Donggwangsan Palace, so top functionaries are usually elsewhere within the complex.

To reduce the disruption to traffic from routine motorcade visits, Choe Sŭng-min requested that a helipad be installed on the roof of the Party Headquarters Building in 1999. It is large enough to safely support landings from a GH-18 transport helicopter, but it usually sees usage from lighter helicopters.

Parade viewing stand

View of Donggwangsan from Heroes' Square, with the parade viewing stand in the foreground.

The parade viewing stand was added to the palace in 1972, replacing a temporary scaffold structure which had been used in the DPRM's first few years. It consists of a central balcony three stories above street level, flanked by stone bleachers. During the annual National Day Parades on May 5th, and the occasional Decembrist Revolution Parades on December 21st, the Chairman and top military and government staff appear on the viewing stand to watch troops march past from north to south. The stand may also be used to deliver speeches, or to watch over ceremonies held in Heroes' Square.

Building 4

Also known as the "R-shaped building," this four-story structure just south of the parade viewing stand houses overflow offices related to central executive administration. It opened in 1979, and it never received an official name or designation; some outside sources refer to it as the South Wing.

Central Military Office

Just south of Building 4, and offset some distance from the road, this three-story building houses the central leadership of the Menghean Armed Forces. It serves as a meeting site for the Joint Army and Navy Leadership, and houses the office of the Supreme Marshal, one of three posts concurrently held by Choe Sŭng-min.

In peacetime, the work of the Central Military Office is fairly limited. The Army headquarters in Dongrŭng and the Navy headquarters in Sunju, both much larger complexes, handle the routine administrative work of their respective branches, and the Ministry of National Defense has its own building four kilometers to the north. During military conflicts, such as the Ummayan Civil War, the Innominadan Crisis, and the Innominadan Uprising, it has taken up a broader role, hosting regular meetings between Choe Sŭng-min, his defense advisors, and the top commanders in the Army and Navy.

Interior layout

6th Floor

Floor plan of the 6th floor of the Donggwangsan main building, with numbered legend.

The top floor of the main Donggwangsan building houses the country's top executive offices. The main office, situated at the middle of the eastern wall, covers an area of 10 by 15 meters and has a ceiling 5.5 meters tall. Three large glass windows overlook Heroes' Square and Central Donggyŏng to the east, with the Kimhae Sea visible in the distance. More than three times the size of any other single-person office in the complex, it was designed to honor the national executive while intimidating visitors, and to house impromptu meetings of top-ranking officials. All three windows Until 1987, it housed the General-Secretary of the Menghean People's Communist Party; since 1987, it has housed the Chairman of the Interim Council for National Restoration, and later of the Supreme Council of Menghe.

To the south, the Chairman's main office has a door to a small meeting room, and beyond that, to the office of the Chairman's Chief of Staff. To the north, another door leads to the Chairman's smaller private study, and then to the office of the First Deputy Chairman, the national second-in-command. The "South Room," located on the southeast corner, houses a large conference table and is used for general-purpose meetings, while smaller rooms along the west side host national-security briefings and ceremonial treaty signings.

The top floor underwent a number of changes during the building's operation. Not long after seizing power, Choe Sŭng-min moved his personal residence from the comfortable south-facing Executive Bedroom on the 5th floor to the spartan North Guard Room on the 6th floor, a gesture intended to signal his embrace of discipline and austerity. In 2005, during the country's emergency military reforms, Choe created the post of Chief National Security Advisor and converted the South Guard Room to his office. The South Guard Room's bathroom was paneled over and remodeled into a secretary's office. The Guard Rooms, which had once provided housing for full-time security staff living on-site, were replaced by a new barracks structure built south of the main building in the 1990s, with guards rotating there when not on duty.

Other changes include the conversion of the North Lobby to a Video Conference Room with special equipment (2009) and the redecoration of the North Kitchen (2011). In 2016, after Choe Sŭng-min was abruptly hospitalized following a heart attack, a document storage room in the north side of the building was converted into a "high-readiness medical attendant's room" where trained nurses rotate through six-hour shifts in order to be immediately on-station should the Chairman suffer another health crisis.

The general interior design, planned out in the 1960s by architect Yang Man-su, reflects the spartan, high-modernist aesthetics of the DPRM period and the early Socialist Republic, with monumental slab-sided columns and minimal use of color and decoration. Paintings hanging on the walls reflect a mix of traditional landscape art and Socialist Realism, and on the 6th floor lean heavily toward the latter: as one walks down the wide hall to the Chairman's office, a massive painting of the 1987 Decembrist Revolution hangs on the left, and an equally massive mural honoring the economic miracle hangs on the right, both of them featuring Choe Sŭng-min prominently at the center. Kerenovian journalist Lukas Janeček, visiting in 2009, described the interior decor as "an incongruous mix of deliberately modern and deliberately traditional motifs, neither of them faithful to the original material, in a style emblematic of the Menghean regime... the entire structure, built as a monument to state power, now doubles as a monument to Choe's ego, ostentatiously spartan and unmistakably totalitarian."

Security and accessibility

View of Donggwangsan from the north. Note the stairway leading up to the northern entrance, which serves the palace museum.

When Yang Man-su designed the new central building in 1964, he deliberately chose an accessible layout which would keep it accessible to ordinary citizens, in contrast to the castle-like citadel of the previous Donggwangsan. The entire outer ring was open to visitors, and its amenities included a history museum, a dining area, and a small concert hall. Checkpoints were installed at the ground-level doors to the old citadel and the fourth-story doors to the inner ring, which housed the General-Secretary's living quarters and working office.

As state concerns over security grew, public accessibility was steadily reduced. During Sim Jin-hwan's term in office, a wrought-iron fence was built around the southeastern corner of the complex, setting aside a section of the grounds for top government and party officials. The fourth floor of the outer ring was also set aside for State and Party officials with adequate clearance.

The Donggwangsan complex's security measures were comprehensively upgraded in 2003 during renovation of the museum hall. The palace museum section, which now comprises three stories on half of the outer ring, is completely separate from the rest of the palace interior, with internal doorways and upper stairwells bricked over and re-finished to match the surrounding architecture. The public section of the palace grounds is separated from the street by a wrought-iron fence, and visitors must enter through one of three security checks. The inner grounds are surrounded by a 4-meter-high stone wall, built in place of the earlier fence, and there are two gates between the inner and public sections, each one staffed by armed guards. Guards at these checkpoints also have full view of the corners of the office wings that face the public grounds, and can apprehend anyone who tries to climb Donggwangsan's stone foundations.

The inner grounds open directly onto the street through two large checkpoints; none of the edge buildings are directly accessible from the street, save for the seats in front of the parade viewing stand, which are normally roped off. Gates on either side of the viewing stand lead to an underground parking garage for staff cars, but these are normally sealed off. Two 14th-century stone towers lying at the edges of the palace grounds have been repurposed as guard stations, and a large "barracks structure" inside the inner grounds appears to house some staff or full-time guards; its exact purpose is unclear.

Nearby buildings

The Pillar of the Decembrist Spirit monument in the center of Heroes' Square.

The parade viewing stand at the east entrance of Donggwangsan faces directly across Heroes' Square, formerly People's Square, a 100,000-square-meter plaza which served as the epicenter of the Decembrist Revolution. At its center is the Pillar of the Decembrist Spirit, a 30-meter-high obelisk commemorating the Revolution with relief sculptures on either side. The dimensions of the upper platform, 12 by 21 meters, represent the date (December 21st) on which the Revolution took place.

On the south side of the square is the Museum of the Decembrist Revolution and the DPRM. This museum occupies the former headquarters of the Menghean People's Communist Party, sections of which have been preserved to look as they did in the 1980s. This preservation includes a 54-meter glass cube surrounding a section of the north facade that was blown away by tank shells, and a dramatized wax figure mural on the ground floor showing Choe's soldiers storming the building. The exhibits of the museum trace the Menghean War of Liberation, the early history of the DPRM, the Perpetual Revolution, the Great Famine, and the Decembrist Revolution; some periods of DPRM history, particularly under Sun Tae-jun and Sim Jin-hwan's leadership, are portrayed positively, while Ryŏ Ho-jun's time in office is presented in an overwhelmingly negative light.

On the opposite side of the square is the National Museum of Menghe, which houses historical artifacts from throughout the country's 5,000-year history. It contains an expansive collection of artifacts on some 150,000 square meters of total floor space, and it is among the most-visited art museums in Septentrion, drawing 5.2 million visitors in 2018.

Just north of the National Museum is the Grand People's Theatre and Cultural Center, built in 1973-1975. It contains three theater halls housing 6,000, 1,000, and 600 people respectively, and has 500 other rooms to support theater operations. It often hosts performances by the Donggyŏng Philharmonic Orchestra, the Red Banner Army Orchestra and Chorus, and the Maehwasan Singing Group.

The palace complex's north gate opens to Okchŏn Park (玉泉公園 / 옥천공원). This is a large landscape of gardens, ponds, pavilions, and rock arrangements, which historically was attached to the Governor's Palace. A staircase leading under Liberation North Road allows pedestrians to easily cross from the entrance of one to the entrance of the other, though they have separate security and ticketing stations.

On the southern end of the palace lies the Sŏnmumun Gate Park, which contains the old main gate and the longest intact section of the old palace wall. Today it is separated from the rest of Donggwangsan by Liberation South Road, which was first laid in the 1890s and paved over and expanded after 1964. The west side of this park contains the Number 226 Primary School, a combined Primary and Middle School institution established in 1974 to educate the children of top Party and Government leaders residing near Donggwangsan. It is still regarded as one of the best schools in the city.

There are two Donggyŏng Metro stations in the immediate vicinity of Donggwangsan. The first, Donggwangsan Station, is located underneath the Northern Meridian Avenue just in front of Building No. 4, with entry ramps doubling as a pedestrian underpass beneath the busy 12-lane road. It is a transfer station between the north-south Line 3 and the east-west Line 1 and Line 18. The Ministry of Civil Affairs Station, also Line 3, is located 400 meters north of the palace's northern wall.

See also

• National Assembly (Menghe)
• Government of Menghe
• Supreme Council of Menghe
• Chairman of the Supreme Council of Menghe