page_title: Kijong-dong
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Kijong-dong / History
caption_attribution_description: English: View on Kijong-dong village in the Demilitarized zone in Northern Korea Plattdüütsch: Blick op dat Dörp Kijong in de Demilitariseerte Zoon in Noordkorea
context_page_description: Kijŏng-dong, Kijŏngdong, or Kijŏng tong, is a village in P'yŏnghwa-ri, Kaesong-si, 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 four-kilometre-wide DMZ set up under the 1953 armistice ending the Korean War; the other is the South Korean village of Daeseong-dong, 2.22 kilometres away.
context_section_description: According to a 1991 statement by the North Korean government, the village has a collective farm that is run and maintained by 200 local families living there, which is serviced by a child-care center, a kindergarten and a primary school and a secondary school, together with a hospital. However, according to South Korea, the town is an uninhabited village which was established during the 1950s in a seeming attempt of using propaganda to encourage pro-North Korean defection from people in South Korea as well as to house and provide for the North Korean Korean People's Army (KPA) troops manning the wide and extensive network of artillery-gun positions, defensive fortifications and underground command-and-control centres and marshalling-bunkers that surround the border zone.
  The village features a number of brightly-painted multi-story buildings and low-rise apartments with almost all structures there apparently wired for and provided with electricity. The small town was oriented and positioned such that the bright-blue roofs and white side-walls of the various residential buildings built next to the massive pole flying the North Korean flag would be particularly-distinguishing features when viewed from the southern side across the border (the DMZ) between the two Koreas. Scrutiny with modern telescopic lenses and clearer and sharper images produced, however, has led to the conclusion amongst many that the village's buildings are simply empty shells of concrete and steel which lack not only window-glass but even interior rooms and floors as well, with lights in the buildings and structures turned on and off and empty sidewalks in the small town being swept by caretakers as part of possible efforts by the North Korean authorities to preserve the illusion of activity and life in the village.
  The village is surrounded by extensive and vast cultivated farm-fields which are clearly visible, not only to visitors to the North Korean side of the DMZ, but to visitors to the South Korean side as well.
caption: View of Kijŏng-dong
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