Today, when I was editing a video draft on North Korea's nuclear deterrence, I suddenly remembered the "Liujing Hotel", the tallest building in North Korea, which has been built for 30 years.
The building is a "relic of the Cold War".
In 1987, North Korea opened the Liujing Hotel, which means the capital of willow trees and is also another name for Pyongyang. North Korea built the 300-meter-tall, 105-story tower, in part because of competition with South Korea. Because just the year before, a South Korean company built the world's tallest hotel in Singapore at the time, the Westin Stanford.
However, due to engineering problems and the rupture of funds and aid after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the construction of the Liujing Hotel was stopped in 1992, which was 16 years.
In 2008, Egyptian conglomerate Orascom signed an agreement with North Korea to spend $180 million to install glass and metal panels on concrete structures to give the building a sleek appearance.
At the end of 2012, the German hotel group Kempinski announced that the Liukin Hotel would partially open under its management in mid-2013, but Kempinski left a few months later.
In 2018, LEDs were installed on the floor of the Liujing Hotel, turning the high-rise building into the largest light show scene in Pyongyang. But its interior remains empty and is the tallest vacant building in the world.
