Before anything else, an honest note: independent travel in North Korea is not possible, and visitors can only go on organised tours with official guides, so a ride here is a matter of reading about a place rather than taking a route. With that said, the Twin-Column Tomb sits near Yonggang, a town of about thirteen thousand on the plain near the coast, not far from the larger city of Nampo, and it belongs to the Koguryo kingdom, one of the Three Kingdoms of ancient Korea.
Koguryo was a powerful state that ruled much of the Korean peninsula and Manchuria from the first century BC until 668 AD, famous for its horsemen, fortresses and painted tombs. UNESCO listed a group of these tombs in 2004, including some near Pyongyang and others on the Nampo plain. The tomb here gets its name from two octagonal stone pillars that support the entrance of the main chamber, a distinctive architectural feature. Inside, the walls were once decorated with murals of daily life, guardians and the four mythical beasts of the cardinal directions, though the condition of the paintings varies and access to tombs is often restricted to protect them.
The landscape around is flat farmland on the edge of the Taedong river's estuary, with rice fields, orchards and low hills, and the roads are typically quiet, with few private vehicles. Official visits tend to follow set itineraries, and spontaneous stops are rarely allowed. Facilities for fuel, food and lodging, where available to visitors, are arranged by guides, and the best that can be said from a distance is that Nampo is a significant port with a large barrage across the river mouth.
The murals are of real interest to art historians, because they preserve the look of the clothes, houses, banquets and hunting scenes of a kingdom that left few written records. The style influenced Korean and Japanese art, and the paintings in Takamatsuzuka in Japan show similarities.
If you have a chance to see one of these tombs, expect a low mound, a small stone entrance and a dim interior, kept cool and protected. If not, books and museum displays in Seoul and elsewhere offer replicas.