Hoeryong Today
Hoeryong City in North Hamgyong Province lies along the Tuman River in the northern tip of Korea. Every year many people from all parts of the country visit Hoeryong.
It is not the mere scenic beauty of the place which had long been famous as one of the scenic spots in North Hamgyong Province that attracts visitors.
Hoeryong is the birthplace of Kim Jong Suk, an anti-Japanese heroine, indomitable revolutionary fighter and the most faithful bodyguard of President Kim Il Sung.
There is still preserved at the foot of Osan Hill a low-roofed straw-thatched house where she was born.
She spent her childhood in this house before her family, impoverished by the oppression and exploitation by the Japanese imperialists and landlords, crossed the Tuman, leaving the hometown behind.
In the long period of the anti-Japanese war to win back the country she never lost the memory of her hometown.
However, she could not visit Hoeryong again until she passed away on September 22, 1949, while conducting energetic activities to implement the line of building a new country put forward by Kim Il Sung after liberation.
Afterwards the people in Hoeryong erected the statue of Kim Jong Suk and Hoeryong Revolutionary Museum on Osan Hill in order to hand down from generation to generation the exploits she had performed for the independence and prosperity of the country.
With a high sense of pride and honour in living in such a historic place the locals turn out to improve the city more beautiful and better to live in.
In recent years multi-storeyed apartment houses were newly built or renovated along the banks of the Hoeryong and Phalul streams.
Public catering establishments in the city, including Hoeryong Restaurant, were either newly established or facelifted.
Befitting the era of the knowledge-based economy and aesthetic taste of the time, such educational establishments as Kim Jong Suk Teachers Training College, Hoeryong College of Light Industry and Kim Ki Song Senior Middle School were renovated. The same can be said of the People’s Library and other people-oriented information dissemination centres, the bases of public health and cultural recreation including Hoeryong Maternity Hospital and the Hoeryong City Hall of Culture.
The local industry in the city is worthy of mentioning throughout the country.
Many local-industry factories of processing white apricot, one of the three specialities of Hoeryong, foodstuffs and condiments and producing paper are equipped with modern facilities and turn out products that win popularity not only in the province but also across the country. Thanks to the development of local industry, the citizens’ livelihood becomes better off.
The lifetime wish of Kim Jong Suk is being realized along with developing Hoeryong.
Naenara, Sept. 2014