Last Updated on September 15, 2026 by Daniel Globe
If you asked most people to picture a national zoo, they’d probably imagine gift shops, ice cream carts, and maybe a slightly bored lion. Pyongyang’s Central Zoo throws that picture out the window. Tucked near Taesong Mountain in the North Korean capital, this sprawling animal park has become almost as famous for its bizarre sideshows and political baggage as for the roughly 5,000 animals living inside it.
It’s a place where diplomacy gets settled with elephants instead of handshakes, where a chimpanzee reportedly picked up a cigarette habit, and where the line between “zoo” and “propaganda set” gets blurry more often than you’d expect.
Built From Gifts, Not Just Purchases
The zoo opened its gates back in 1960, and from day one it leaned heavily on international gift-giving rather than typical zoo acquisitions. Some of its very first elephants arrived as a personal donation from Ho Chi Minh, and their descendants reportedly still live on the grounds today. A pair of giant pandas showed up courtesy of Beijing Zoo in the mid-1960s, with a second pair following a few years later — though none of them stuck around past 1980.
That pattern of animals arriving as political gestures rather than routine transfers has basically defined the place ever since.
When Countries Trade Animals Like Baseball Cards
Here’s where things get genuinely fascinating: North Korea has used this zoo as a low-key diplomatic tool for decades. Back in the 1980s, animals were swapped with a zoo in Kyoto — water deer and wolves went one way, a llama and a red kangaroo came back the other.
Then there’s the story involving the 2000 inter-Korean summit, where Kim Jong Il reportedly gifted a pair of Jindo dogs (adorably named after peace and reunification) to the South, and received a pair of Pungsan dogs in return. The Jindo pair apparently had puppies within a year — a rare feel-good footnote in an otherwise tense relationship.
More recently, the zoo picked up animals from Zimbabwe under Robert Mugabe (including unweaned elephant calves, a decision that drew heavy criticism from conservation groups), plus a wave of new arrivals from Russia in late 2024 — a lion, brown bears, yaks, cockatoos, and more. Even in 2026, North Korean state media has kept up the habit of publicly announcing new arrivals, framing them as evidence the zoo is thriving.
The Residents That Made This Zoo Genuinely Famous
Forget the elephants and pandas for a second — the animals that actually built this zoo’s international reputation are far stranger. There’s Azalea, a chimpanzee who reportedly picked up cigarette smoking as a trained behavior, something that’s been written about repeatedly by outside journalists and travel writers over the years. There’s also a dog said to be trained to manipulate an abacus, monkeys that play basketball, doves worked into a figure-skating-style routine, and — perhaps strangest of all — a parrot once reported to squawk phrases praising former leader Kim Il Sung.
Whether every one of these acts is performed exactly as described by visiting journalists is hard to verify from the outside, but the pattern is consistent enough across multiple independent accounts to suggest the zoo genuinely leans into novelty and spectacle as part of its identity.
A Zoo With a Direct Line to North Korea’s Leadership
Unlike most national zoos, this one has an unusually personal connection to the country’s ruling family. After Kim Il Sung died in 1994, his pet dogs were reportedly relocated to live out their lives at the zoo. Years later, when Kim Jong Il was recovering from a stroke, state media released photos of him visiting the zoo, widely interpreted as an attempt to project an image of good health.
Kim Jong Un and his wife have continued that tradition of public zoo visits, often paired with photo opportunities that have drawn sharp criticism from outside observers — including commentary noting the optics of publicly feeding zoo animals in a country that has struggled with food shortages.
Behind the Novelty: A Troubling Track Record
Strip away the quirky headlines, and the zoo’s actual animal welfare record looks a lot more concerning. Its Amur leopard population has reportedly suffered from inbreeding, resulting in animals born with physical defects and reproductive abnormalities — a serious problem for a species already critically endangered in the wild. Record-keeping around the leopards’ lineage has also been called into question, with international studbook organizations offering claims about the population’s origins that don’t line up with other available evidence.
There have also been darker allegations over the years, including a 2006 report describing a North Korean film that reportedly showed caged animals of different species being placed together and provoked into fighting — a claim that, if accurate, would implicate zoo staff directly in staged animal cruelty for entertainment purposes.
Visiting primatologist accounts haven’t been kind either. One well-known description from a visit during Robert Mugabe’s animal donations recounts zebras so thin they resembled scarecrows, reportedly still forced to perform tricks like bike riding despite visibly struggling with the physical toll.
So What’s the Verdict From Outsiders?
International reviewers have not been gentle. One well-traveled guidebook publisher bluntly labeled the zoo an uninspiring place better skipped altogether, and other visitors have described watching animals live out what amounts to a joyless existence. At the same time, when North Korea briefly reopened to limited tourism in 2025, there were rumors that zoo visits were essentially staged theater with paid actors posing as ordinary visitors — claims that were later walked back as unverified misinformation, a reminder that even the rumors surrounding this place can be as unreliable as the zoo’s own messaging.
The Bottom Line
Korea Central Zoo isn’t really comparable to any other national zoo on Earth, and that’s precisely what makes it such a strange case study. It’s part conservation effort, part diplomatic archive, part propaganda backdrop, and part genuinely bizarre roadside attraction — except the “roadside” happens to be one of the most closed-off capital cities in the world. Whatever else it is, it’s rarely boring.
