Kijong-dong
Kijŏng-dong, Kijŏngdong, Kijŏng tong or Kaepoong is a Potemkin village in P'yŏnghwa-ri, Panmun-guyok, Kaesong Special City, North Korea. It is situated in the North's half of the Korean Demilitarized Zone. Also known in North Korea as Peace Village, it has been widely referred to as 'Propaganda Village' by those outside North Korea, especially in South Korean and Western media.
Kijŏng-dong is one of two villages permitted to remain in the wide DMZ set up under the 1953 armistice during the Korean War; the other is the South Korean village of Daeseong-dong, away.
History
The North Korean government says the village contains a 200-family collective farm, serviced by a child care center, kindergarten, primary and secondary schools, and a hospital. However, it is actually an uninhabited settlement built in the 1950s as part of a propaganda campaign to encourage South Korean defection. Some parts are used to garrison Korean People's Army soldiers manning a network of artillery positions, fortifications and underground marshalling bunkers along this part of the DMZ.The village features a number of brightly painted, poured-concrete multi-story buildings. Its layout is oriented so that the buildings' bright blue roofs and multi-colored walls beneath Kijong-dong's massive DPRK flag and flagpole, can be clearly seen from the South Korean border. Windows are either left unglazed or just painted onto exterior walls. Electrical lights on timers periodically turn on and off in some buildings. The buildings are concrete shells that are maintained by caretakers in an effort to preserve the illusion of activity.
Flagpole
In the 1980s, the South Korean government built a tall flagpole with a flag of South Korea in Daeseong-dong.The North Korean government responded by building an even taller one, the Panmunjom flagpole, at with a flag of North Korea in Kijŏng-dong, across the demarcation line from South Korea, in what some have called the "flagpole war". For over a decade, the flagpole was the tallest in the world. In 2010, the flagpole became the second-tallest flagpole in the world at the time, after the National Flag Square in Baku, Azerbaijan, at. It is now the ninth-tallest flagpole in the world, and the tallest supported one.