Susan-ri is a burial mound near the west coast of North Korea, a few kilometres from the Taedong River estuary and the barrage that closes it off. Under the earth lies a stone chamber painted with murals from the Goguryeo kingdom, which ruled the northern Korean peninsula and much of Manchuria from the first centuries BC until 668 AD. The tomb belongs to the Complex of Koguryo Tombs, which UNESCO listed in 2004. The wall paintings show figures, animals and the four guardian creatures of the cardinal directions, and they are among the oldest and most vivid pictures in the region.
An honest note first. This is not a place where an independent motorcyclist can ride in. Foreign visitors to North Korea travel in organised groups with official guides, on set routes, and independent motorcycle touring is simply not on offer. What can be said here is about the land and the history, which are worth knowing about even from a distance.
The country around is a flat, intensively farmed plain along the Taedong and the Yellow Sea coast, with low hills rising behind. Rice fields, orchards and small villages sit between big roads that carry little traffic. Nampo, the nearest large city, is the main port for Pyongyang and lies on the river mouth, with the West Sea Barrage, an eight-kilometre dam, closing the estuary. Yonggang, a smaller town nearby, is the local centre.
Goguryeo is a point of pride in Korea and a point of dispute with China, which also lists tombs of the kingdom within its borders. The kingdom had a capital at Pyongyang from the fifth century and built walled mountain cities that were easy to defend. Its tombs were mounded with earth and covered in grass, and the chambers inside were sealed with stone doors and painted by court artists. They survived looters and centuries of damp, and the paintings have been a difficult conservation task.
For anyone curious, the best way to see them is through scholarship, museum exhibits in South Korea and Japan, and the careful photographs published by the UNESCO team. The landscape is gentle, the climate has hot, wet summers and cold, dry winters, and spring and autumn are the pleasant seasons.