Timeline

1993

Nick Bonner and Josh Green, two Brits living in China, found Koryo Tours. The duo leads a group of seven people on the company’s first-ever tour of the DPRK.

1995

The Festival for Peace is held in April. Guests include Muhammad Ali, and over 100 tourists in attendance thanks to Koryo, which arranges for them to watch the WCW’s Ric Flair wrestle Japan’s Inoki in a 150,000-capacity stadium. It’s the first time that Western tourists visit Pyongyang in significant numbers.

2005

Koryo Tours helps facilitate entry into the DPRK for US citizens for the first time in three years, as part of its mission to encourage engagement and mutual understanding through tourism. This is the year when travel to the DPRK really takes off, thanks in part to the Arirang Mass Games, which runs until 2013.

2007

Following the co-production of three successful documentary films about the DPRK, Koryo starts work on a feature-length romcom with Belgian producer Anja Daelemans and DPRK’s April 25th Film Studio. The resulting movie — Comrade Kim Goes Flying — goes on to become the first DPRK film to be shown at a public screening in South Korea, where it is selected for the Busan International Film Festival.

2008

Building on previous work, this is a watershed year for Koryo’s sporting tours, with a cricket, football, and volleyball team travelling to Pyongyang together for a series of friendly games with their DPRK counterparts. The success of these events shows sport to be one of the best ways to interact with Koreans in a non-political way.

2010

After eight years of letters, proposals and meetings, Koryo finally succeeds in its efforts to have restricted areas of the east coast — such as Hamhung (pictured) and Pujon — opened up to its tourists, who become the first Westerners many Koreans in that region have ever seen. Koryo’s mission to engage rather than isolate continues with the 2013 opening of Sinuiju, new routes in the northeast, and much more.

2014

The Pyongyang Marathon has been a popular event for locals since 1981. Koryo Tours manages to organise entry in to this somewhat closed race some 33 years later, and convinces the race's organisers to allow 92 of its tourists to take part. Once this barrier is broken down, there's no turning back, with 203 foreign amateurs joining in via Koryo in 2015, and close to 600 tourists taking part in 2016. Koryo is now the race's exclusive travel partner, and in charge of all overseas amateur entries.

2018

The Mass Games, which were last performed in 2013, return to Pyongyang. We took hundreds of tourists to see this incredible spectacle of over 100,000 dancers, gymnasts and musicians working in perfect synchronisation in what has been dubbed "the greatest show on Earth".

2019

An exhibition of Nicholas Bonner's book 'Made in North Korea: Graphics From Everyday Life in the DPRK', published by Phaidon in 2017, is hosted at Hongik University in Seoul. This world-class catalogue of North Korean graphic ephemera – from tinned fruit, to cigarette cartons, to washing up liquid – is all from Bonner's private collection based on more than two decades of travel to the country. This is the first time that people in South Korea are able to have such an insight into North Korean culture and daily life.