Ethnic minorities are very rare in North Korea, which prides itself on its homogeneity. However, some ethnic Koreans in the DPRK are set apart, due to their time (or their ancestors’ time) spent in foreign countries before moving back.

This is part three in Prof. Andrei Lankov’s three-part series on these communities. For part one, on Japanese-Koreans in the DPRK, click here. For part two, on Russian-Koreans, click here.

The late 1990s and the early 2000s were a time of massive illegal migration by North Koreans to the borderlands of China – up to 200,000 North Koreans moved