They told us stories about North Korea.
That it was a prison-state. A gray monolith sealed shut by fear and famine. The kind of place where truth suffocated under portraits and people bowed not from respect, but from the weight of invisible chains. They told us no one left, and no one truly lived. That behind the barbed wire and frozen smiles, there was only darkness. A dead zone.
I believed it. We all did. You'd have to be mad not to — the reports, the documentaries, the defectors' testimonies. All of it painted the same picture: North Korea was a cautionary tale, a wound held together by iron and silence.
So when I tell you that everything I thought I knew was a lie, understand the gravity of that admission. I am not a man prone to delusions. At least, I wasn't.
My name doesn't matter, not anymore. Back then, I was a low-ranking attaché in Beijing. Diplomatic work — the kind that looks important on paper but is mostly handshakes, dinners, and politely ignoring the real conversations happening three doors down. I was good at blending in, good at saying just enough and never too much. It kept me invisible. Safe.
Until the dinner.
It was one of those tedious functions hosted in a lacquered hotel ballroom. Too much wine, too little sincerity. I remember the lighting was harsh, everything washed in sterile gold. I sat next to an old contact from Mongolia — I'll call him Baasandorj — who had always struck me as a man with too many stories and too few people who believed them. We were three glasses in when he leaned close and muttered, "Do you know what's really behind the curtain? Not what the West thinks. Not even what the Chinese pretend to know. The real North Korea."
I laughed. Not because I thought it was funny, but because it was safer than asking questions.
But he persisted.
He told me there was a place, somewhere deep past the fog-draped mountains, where the people did not starve, where no statues stood in every square. A place where the old dynasty was gone — not overthrown in blood and fire, but erased with something worse than violence: irrelevance.
I should have dismissed it as drunken fantasy.
Instead, I listened.
And that was the beginning.
A week later, I found myself in the back seat of an unmarked car, my phone surrendered to a driver who said nothing the entire trip. We drove north, then east, then deeper still, into roads so narrow and rough I was convinced we'd gotten lost. Pines lined the path like ancient sentinels, mist curling around their trunks like restless spirits. The air grew colder, sharper. Every turn felt final.
And then we stopped.
No border fence. No guards in gray uniforms. Just a simple stone marker carved with three Hanja characters: 解放山 — Haebangsan. The Mountain of Liberation.
When I stepped out, the silence struck me first. Not an absence of sound, but a kind of serene fullness. Birdsong. The gentle rush of water nearby. The rustle of wind through leaves. I had never heard such honest quiet before.
The village — if you could even call it that — lay just beyond a low ridge. Modest homes with sloped roofs, gardens blooming in vivid colors, narrow footpaths that seemed to hum with warmth. Children ran barefoot through fields, laughing in a way that didn't feel rehearsed. Old men played baduk beneath trees. Women hung laundry that danced like flags in the wind.
This wasn't a show for outsiders. There were no tour guides, no propaganda. No one even acknowledged me as anything more than another passerby. And that was the strangest part — I didn't feel watched. I felt… welcomed, without a word.
They say history ended here and began again in secret.
The old capital, Pyongyang, still exists. But it is no longer the heart of the nation. It's a preserved city now — a monument to caution. The real pulse of the country beats in Haebangsan, a city that doesn't appear on any map, carved into stepped terraces surrounding a glacial lake. It rises like a lotus — serene, deliberate, impossible.
This is the domain of Daewon.
Not "Supreme Leader." Not "Chairman." Not "Comrade."
Just Daewon.
They say he came from nowhere — a scholar of forgotten lineages, trained not in military academies but in ancient texts. That he walked the ruins of Nineveh and Xi'an. That he fasted in the Gobi Desert until his dreams ran clear. That he read Marcus Aurelius by candlelight in the tomb of Genghis Khan.
I don't know what's myth and what's memory.
What I do know is this: the Kim family is gone.
Not executed. Not exiled. Simply… removed. As if they were a fever that broke in the night. There are no portraits, no slogans. Only a single statue remains — a broken monument left untouched at the edge of Pyongyang, vines crawling up its legs. It is not honored, but not destroyed either. Daewon believes even lies must be remembered.
I met him once.
It was unannounced. I was walking through a public garden — one of many in Haebangsan — when I saw an old man kneeling beside a pond, feeding koi with practiced stillness. His robes were plain gray, his hair long and silver. He did not look up as I approached.
"You came to find the lie," he said, as if we had been speaking for hours already. "And instead, you found the secret. Tell me — will you return to the world, or will you remain in the garden?"
I said nothing. I didn't know how.
He stood slowly, not with frailty but with restraint, as if he measured every motion against some unseen scale.
"History is a river," he said. "You cannot stop it. But you can build gardens on its banks."
And then he walked away, leaving me with nothing but the sound of wind in the reeds.
That was six months ago.
I have not left.
Not because I am a prisoner. There are no fences, no watchtowers. I could leave at any time. But I do not want to. Not yet. Not while I am still learning the shape of this strange paradise — this republic of scholars and farmers, this kingdom of quiet revolution.
The world still sees North Korea as a scar. But perhaps it is not a scar at all. Perhaps it is a chrysalis.
And we — the outsiders — have only ever seen the shell.