Far out of the center of town, and well out of the mainstream of local affairs, the building which once housed the North Korean embassy in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, is surrounded by reminders of a different era.

The wide boulevard onto which the one-storey edifice faces is named after the Georgian poet Shota Rustaveli. The building next-door, a hotel, is a monument to the distinctive shapes into which Soviet concrete was molded in Central Asia.

Apartment blocks on both sides of the street are exactly the kind of solid, if crumbling, rectangles of plastered brickwork which line Pyongyang’s own thoroughfares.