When the top leader of North Korea travels abroad, its secretive government often does not confirm the trip until he has arrived at his destination, or even after he has returned home.
So when both China and North Korea announced last week that Kim Jong-un would attend a military parade in Beijing on Wednesday, overseas intelligence officials began looking for the whereabouts of a train painted a drab green.
That train, known in North Korea simply as “The Sun,” is Mr. Kim’s bulletproof private vehicle and his favored mode of transportation when he travels abroad. His father and his grandfather, who ruled the country before him, also used it, and a fourth-generation Kim was aboard when it reached Beijing on Tuesday, according to state media: Mr. Kim’s young daughter, Kim Ju-ae, who is increasingly being seen as a potential successor.
China organized the military parade to mark the 80th anniversary of the end of the Sino-Japanese War and World War II. It has invited heads of state from more than 20 countries to attend, including countries hostile toward the United States like Russia and Iran. The event will be Mr. Kim’s debut on a multilateral diplomatic stage — and his daughter’s.
Here is what we know about the train, which took Mr. Kim to China for his first trip there since 2019.
Family Ride
The Kim family, which has ruled North Korea since the country was founded at the end of World War II, has a long history of traveling by rail to China, Russia and other parts of what was then the Soviet Union.
Mr. Kim’s father, Kim Jong-il, was said to have a fear of flying. He used the train exclusively for trips to China and Russia, including a three-week, 12,400-mile round trip to Moscow in 2001. If he was aerophobic, he was also a great lover of train travel.
“If you travel by plane, you do not see anything of the country but the airports and the capital, while traveling by train gives one the opportunity to see the expanses and the cities, the nature, and to stop and set the foot on the ground, to see reality with one’s own eyes, and to meet and to talk with the locals,” Kim Jong-il once told his Russian hosts, according to an account by Georgy Toloraya, a former Russian diplomat.
Kim Jong-un, like his grandfather, Kim Il-sung, does not seem to mind traveling by plane. He flew on a Soviet-era jet when he visited China in 2018.
But North Korean officials are not confident that their decrepit fleet of Soviet planes can cover longer distances, according to South Korean officials.
Kim Jong-un has used the train on two other trips to China, and for trips to Russia’s far east in 2019 and 2023. When he had to cross an ocean in 2018, to make the 3,000-mile trip to Singapore to meet with President Trump, Beijing rented him a Boeing 747.
The Kim family’s train has featured heavily in state propaganda over the years, ferrying the dictators abroad and around North Korea on frequent visits to military units and farming towns. Kim Jong-il died on the train, of heart failure, during one such trip in 2011, according to state media. His private carriage is on display at a mausoleum in Pyongyang, where he lies in state.
Slow Ride
Kim Jong-un has continued the family tradition, using the train as an office on wheels. Last year, he took it to flood-stricken provinces and presided over a Politburo meeting in one of its cars, with the officials seated around a long desk, according to footage released by state media.
The train is equipped with couches, satellite phones, computers and TV sets. Its crew is said to include a small army of bodyguards and medical staff. Heavy weapons are also aboard, and many of the cars have bulletproof plating, especially the ones where Mr. Kim works and sleeps, according to South Korean officials. The train has also carried Mr. Kim’s bulletproof sedans.
The extra weight of all that hardware, along with the decrepit state of North Korea’s rail system, makes for a slow ride. The train can reach a maximum speed of just 37 miles per hour inside North Korea, according to experts in South Korea. In 2019, it took Mr. Kim nearly three days to cross North Korea and China on the train and reach Hanoi, Vietnam, for his second summit with Mr. Trump.
Luxury Ride
The train has long been said to be stocked with supplies that cater to the ruling Kim’s whims.
“It was possible to order any dish of Russian, Chinese, Korean, Japanese and French cuisine,” wrote Konstantin Pulikovsky, a Russian official who traveled with Kim Jong-il during one of his Russian trips.
Mr. Kim insisted that live lobster and other fresh delicacies be delivered to the train as it crossed Siberia, Mr. Pulikovsky said. Cases of Bordeaux and Burgundy wines were flown in from Paris, the Russian official recounted in his memoir of the trip, “Orient Express.”
Mr. Toloraya, the former diplomat, said Kim Jong-il was accompanied on one Russia trip by several singers and actors, who performed for him and his guests in both Korean and Russian. South Korean intelligence officials suspect that Kim Jong-un has inherited his father’s penchant for wining and dining, though no similar anecdotes from his trips have been made public.
Choe Sang-Hun is the lead reporter for The Times in Seoul, covering South and North Korea.
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