There is a low-roofed thatched house at Mangyongdae in the capital city of Pyongyang, which has been famous for its beautiful scenery from olden times.

In this humble house built in the 1860s President Kim Il Sung (April 15, 1912- July 8, 1994), the founding father of socialist Korea, was born and spent his childhood. The visitors to it are greatly surprised at the fact that the house is too modest to be the native home of a man with such great reputation and ennobling personality.

Preserved in the house are many relics like the desk and inkstone young Kim Il Sung used when he was studying, a brazier, tableware, A-frame carrier, plough, loom, spinning wheel and reed mats his family used. What gives the visitors a particularly strong impression is a misshapen jar. His family was so poor that it could not afford to buy a normal jar, an essential household article.

He left his birthplace following his father who devoted himself to the struggle to win back the country that was militarily occupied by the Japanese imperialists. But in March 1923 he came back home from Northeast China covering 250 miles on foot all alone and entered Changdok School, so as to have a better understating of the reality of his country. Then, having heard that his father had been arrested again by the Japanese police, he left Mangyongdae again in January 1925 with a firm determination not to return home before winning back his country.

He won back the lost country from the Japanese military occupation on August 15, 1945 by leading the bloody anti-Japanese armed struggle to victory and returned to his country after 20 years.

But he could not visit his native home soon, for he had a lot of things to do for building a new Korea. He went to the Kangson Steel Plant (the present Chollima Steel Complex) first before his native place though it is along the way to the plant. He visited his native home only after he founded the Workers’ Party of Korea, the guiding force of the Korean revolution, on October 10, 1945 and gave his first address to the people in the homeland at the historic Pyongyang mass rally to welcome him on October 14, 1945.

That day his grandmother came out into the courtyard barefoot and hugged him, saying in tears, “Why have you come alone? Where have you left your father and mother?” Among his family members who had left the house to win back the country, Kim Il Sung was the only one who returned.

The straw-thatched house is so historic, indeed.

After that, whenever he passed through the gate of someone else’s home, he would wonder how many members of the family had gone out through that gate and how many of them had returned.

Kim Il Sung ’s native home at Mangyongdae will brilliantly shine forever in the mind of the Korean people as an immortal sacred place of the revolution conveying his noble popular traits.

Pak Kyong Chol