Red Caviar and Blackouts: Inside the Secret World of North Korea's Hidden Rich

The Party That Never Made the News

Sometime in the spring of 2019 — a defector I'll call Jisun, a former resident of Pyongyang's Moranbong district, told me this story over instant coffee in a cramped Seoul apartment — there was a birthday party in a villa on the outskirts of the capital. Not a party by any standard we'd recognize. There were bottles of Hennessy Paradis. There was imported sushi, flown in through Dalian. A DJ had been brought up from somewhere, no one quite knew where, and the music went on until four in the morning. The host was the son of a senior official in the Organization and Guidance Department. He was twenty-six. And outside that villa, in the same city, families were rationing corn porridge.

North Korea Untold

That's North Korea's dirty secret that even most North Korea watchers underplay. Yes, everyone knows the Kim family lives in obscene luxury. But there's a second tier — a floating, semi-hidden class of the genuinely wealthy that exists below the leadership but far, far above everyone else. They're not in any official registry. They don't appear in state media. And yet they are very, very real.

Who Are These People, Exactly?

It's not a simple answer. I've spent the better part of seven years now piecing this together from interviews with defectors — over sixty at this point, conducted in Seoul, Shenyang, London, and twice in a diner just outside Fort Lee, New Jersey — and the picture that emerges is genuinely complicated. These aren't just the children of generals, though some are. They're traders who got spectacularly lucky during the famine years. They're mid-level party officials who quietly built business empires behind state-owned fronts. They're the wives of men with connections to Bureau 39 — Kim Jong-un's personal slush fund, which siphons hard currency from overseas operations, drug trafficking, weapons sales, cybercrime. Some of them, honestly, are women who married well and then outlasted their husbands.

One defector — a man I interviewed in November 2021, who worked for several years as a driver for a wealthy family in Pyongyang — described his employers this way: "They had three apartments. Three. In the Ryugyong-dong area. One was just for storage. For things they bought and hadn't opened yet." He paused when he said that. Just sat with it for a moment. Things they bought and hadn't opened yet.

The term that gets used, increasingly, in defector testimony is donju — literally "masters of money." It emerged in the post-famine 1990s when the state distribution system collapsed and people had to fend for themselves. Most people nearly starved. A small number figured out how to profit from the chaos — by controlling access to markets, by bribing officials for trade licenses, by smuggling goods across the Chinese border. The most successful donju, by the 2010s, had quietly accumulated the kind of wealth that would seem comfortable in Seoul or Shanghai.

What They Own, What They Spend

Here's where it gets almost surreal. According to multiple sources — including a former female trader who operated out of Sinuiju from roughly 2008 to 2016 before defecting — the consumer goods market for the wealthy in Pyongyang is far more sophisticated than the regime would ever want the outside world to know. She described shops, accessible only through personal connection or referral, that stocked South Korean cosmetics, Chinese iPhones, European wine, even — she mentioned this almost as an afterthought — French cheese. "The kind that smells," she said, which I found oddly endearing. She meant brie.

Apartments are the big status marker. Pyongyang has seen genuine real estate speculation — something the government technically doesn't allow, because technically all property belongs to the state. But money finds a way. Defectors consistently describe an informal market in apartment transfers, where "fees" are paid to officials to reassign housing titles. A well-positioned apartment in the Changjon Street area — those glass-tower developments you see in regime propaganda photos — can apparently change hands for the equivalent of tens of thousands of dollars. In a country where the official monthly salary for most workers is somewhere between two and five dollars. Let that sit with you for a second.

Cars are another marker. North Korea imports Chinese-made vehicles through official channels, but the donju with real money want more. According to one source who worked in Pyongyang's informal vehicle trade around 2014-2015, used Mercedes and Toyota Land Cruisers were being brought in through Chinese intermediaries — technically as "gifts" to officials, practically as purchases. The paperwork was creative, let's say that. And getting caught didn't always mean punishment if you were well-connected enough. It sometimes meant renegotiating your arrangement with whoever was doing the catching.

Jisun — the woman from Moranbong who told me about the 2019 birthday party — mentioned something else that has stuck with me. She said the wealthy in Pyongyang had what she called a "second phone system." Not the official Koryolink network available to regular citizens, which is completely domestic, completely monitored, completely sealed off from the outside internet. Something else. She was vague on the technical details, and I don't want to overstate her technical knowledge — she's a textile worker, not an engineer — but she described wealthy acquaintances who could, occasionally and with great care, send messages or files to contacts in China. This aligns with reports from researchers at Seoul-based NGOs who've documented the use of modified Chinese phones and unofficial border-area signals. It's a fragment. But it matters.

The Geography of Privilege

Pyongyang is the obvious center of this world. The city functions as a kind of showcase, a stage set, and the wealthy play along with the theater of it while building their real lives behind the curtain. But I want to push back a bit on the Pyongyang-centric view, because some of what I've heard suggests the geography of North Korean wealth is changing.

Sinuiju — right on the Chinese border in North Pyongan province — has produced some genuinely powerful trading families. The town sits across the Yalu River from Dandong, which is by far the largest conduit for China-North Korea trade. A defector I spoke with in early 2020, a man who had worked in Dandong as an unofficial intermediary between Chinese suppliers and North Korean buyers, described the Sinuiju merchant families as "almost like their own thing." Less connected to the Pyongyang party aristocracy, more connected to money. "In Pyongyang you need the right ancestors," he told me. "In Sinuiju you need the right phone numbers."

Wonsan, on the east coast, has its own elite geography — partly because Kim Jong-un has shown a personal preference for the area, pouring investment into the Masikryong ski resort and the Wonsan-Kalma coastal development zone. Where the leader goes, the connected follow. And where the connected go, the smart money follows them. I was told by a source who'd had contact with Wonsan-based traders that the city had seen an influx of Pyongyang-connected donju in the mid-2010s, essentially positioning themselves to profit from whatever development Kim had in mind. Some of it materialized. Some of it didn't, especially after sanctions tightened post-2017.

The Risk Underneath the Luxury

And this is the thing that I think the outside world doesn't quite grasp about North Korea's wealthy: they are not secure. Not even a little bit. The entire edifice of their comfort rests on political favor, and political favor in North Korea is a substance that can evaporate overnight, without warning, without appeal.

I interviewed a woman — I'll call her Mirae, she's now living in Incheon — who grew up in a donju household in Pyongyang in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Her father ran what was nominally a state construction company but was effectively a private enterprise that he'd built through years of careful bribe-paying and relationship cultivation. They lived well. Very well, by North Korean standards. Two cars, a large apartment, regular access to imported goods. And then in 2006, she said, something shifted. She never knew exactly what. Her father fell out with someone, or someone fell out with him, or a rival paid a larger bribe to a more powerful official. Within months the company was restructured, which meant confiscated. Her father was sent to do "labor mobilization" in the provinces — humiliating, physically punishing work usually reserved for those being informally punished. The family kept their apartment but lost almost everything else.

"The worst part," Mirae told me, "was that everyone pretended it hadn't happened. The neighbors who'd been coming to our house for dinner parties. Gone. Just — gone. Like we'd never existed."

This vulnerability is structural, not accidental. Kim Jong-un, like his father and grandfather before him, needs the elite to be wealthy enough to be co-opted but insecure enough to be controlled. Periodic crackdowns — sometimes on "anti-socialist behavior," sometimes on currency speculation, sometimes on nothing publicly stated at all — serve as reminders of who actually holds the cards. The donju know this. They know it the way you know something you try not to think about too often. They keep paying. They keep maintaining their political cover. And they keep hoping the music doesn't stop while they're the ones standing.

The Children and the Question of Loyalty

One of the most interesting threads in all my interviews has been the question of the next generation. The children of the donju, educated in Pyongyang's better schools, sometimes sent to study in China — what do they think? What do they know?

The honest answer is: more than their parents probably want them to know, and less than you'd hope. A young defector I met in Seoul in 2022 — he'd left North Korea in late 2021, was in his mid-twenties, son of a successful trader in Pyongyang — was someone I'd been warned might be guarded. He wasn't. He was furious, actually. Not about poverty — he'd never experienced that. About the gap between what he'd been told and what he'd quietly, carefully discovered. He'd had access to a device at university that let him watch outside films. He'd seen South Korean dramas, American movies, Chinese video content. He understood the lie he'd been living inside, not abstractly but concretely, scene by scene.

But here's what complicated his story: he didn't leave because of ideology. He left because his father's business ran into trouble and he calculated that his future in North Korea had narrowed. It was pragmatic. Almost cold, the way he described it. And I think that's a more honest portrait of how privilege functions in that system than any narrative about brave dissidents. For most of the elite, the calculus isn't about freedom. It's about whether the system is still worth betting on.

What the Luxury Actually Looks Like, Up Close

I want to end with something concrete, because I think the abstract talk of "privilege" and "inequality" can flatten what is actually a very strange, very specific human reality.

Jisun described, in our second interview, a meal she attended at a wealthy acquaintance's apartment in late 2018. The table had — she listed these slowly, like she was recounting something almost dreamlike — dog meat soup (common, not a luxury marker), but also imported Chinese beer, a plate of what she identified as smoked salmon, rice prepared with imported Japanese seasoning, and a cake. A real bakery cake, with cream, acquired from one of Pyongyang's hard-currency shops. There was a television on in the background showing a foreign film — she thought it was Chinese, maybe a historical drama. Twelve people around the table. Good clothes. Someone's child showing off that they could say a few words in English.

And outside, in the same city, the electricity had been out since noon. The building's backup generator — a luxury in itself — was the only reason the lights were on. Jisun said she remembered looking at the candles someone had lit on the windowsill, just for atmosphere, while the rest of the city was dark. "Decorative candles," she said. "For decoration. Because they thought it was pretty."

I've done this work for a long time. I've heard terrible things. And somehow that detail — decorative candles in a city-wide blackout, lit for aesthetics, by people with a generator humming underneath them — is the one that stays with me. It says something about the specific texture of that world that I don't know how to summarize neatly. Maybe that's fine. Maybe some things resist the summary.