A Hundred Metres Under Pyongyang

For years, one of the strangest stories about North Korea claimed that Pyongyang’s metro wasn’t really a metro at all — just two elaborately decorated stations, a shuttle train and passengers playing their part. The theory was wrong. In this episode of ExplWorld, we descend roughly a hundred metres beneath Pyongyang to look at the real system behind the myth: sixteen stations, Cold War-era blast doors, monumental mosaics, second-hand trains from Berlin and a railway designed partly to function as a civil-defence shelter. But the deeper story is about information. How did a false theory survive for so long? Which facts about the metro can actually be verified from outside North Korea? And what happens when a country produces plenty of numbers, but almost none of them can be independently checked? Because Pyongyang’s metro is neither simply a stage set nor simply a railway. It is both infrastructure and propaganda — carrying ordinary people beneath one of the least transparent cities in the world.