Nampo
— — the long tide held back behind a wall.
Not only on a wall.
“A port city at the mouth of the Taedong River, where North Korea built an eight-kilometre barrage in the 1980s to hold the tide back from the western farmland. Nampo holds about 370,000 people and most of the country's seaward industry. The barrage carries a road across its top and locks for the freighters, and the shorebirds still come back to the mudflats below it every spring.
Nampo, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Nampo sits about fifty kilometres southwest of Pyongyang at the mouth of the Taedong River, where the river meets the Korea Bay of the Yellow Sea. The city had roughly 370,000 residents at the last available census and is one of the few cities in North Korea with full provincial-equivalent status. It is the country's primary western port, handling much of its foreign trade, and connects to the capital by a six-lane expressway built in the late 1990s and by river-barge traffic.
The defining feature is the West Sea Barrage, completed in 1986 after five years of construction. It runs eight kilometres across the mouth of the Taedong, with three lock chambers and thirty-six sluice gates, built to keep saltwater out of the rice-growing lowlands upstream. State pamphlets count it among the largest seawalls in East Asia. Tidal mudflats below the barrage support large populations of migrating shorebirds, and the river side holds a long freshwater reservoir behind the gates.
Most foreign access to Nampo runs through state-organised tours that include the West Sea Barrage observation deck, the Chollima Steelworks, and a roadside stop at the Kangso Mineral Water bottling plant. The city has a handful of hotels operated by the state tourism authority, including the seafront Ryonggang Hot Spa House. Independent travel is not permitted; itineraries are arranged in advance through Korea International Travel Company in Pyongyang. Visitors typically arrive by car along the Pyongyang-Nampo Expressway, a forty-minute drive from the capital.