Visitors to the chain’s latest outlet must undergo an identity check before getting their venti frappuccinos
Starbucks has opened a cafe atop a lookout point on the Korean Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), allowing curious patrons to sip pumpkin spice lattes while gazing into the nuclear-armed North.
The cafe, which opened on Friday, is located in the Aegibong Peace Ecopark in Gimpo city, about 32km north of Seoul, South Korea. From its terrace, visitors can look across a section of the Han River that is considered neutral waters and into the North Korean town of Kaephung, just over a kilometer away.
On a clear day, Reuters reported, visitors can use telescopes to observe North Korean villagers going about their day across the world’s most heavily militarized border.
The Korean War was halted by an armistice agreement in 1953, but never formally ended. The armistice left the Korean Peninsula divided along the 38th parallel, with the communist North and capitalist South separated by the 4km-wide DMZ. Both sides maintain warrens of fortifications and lookout posts along the DMZ, and North Korea is believed to have more than 10,000 artillery pieces dug in along its side of the border, including in the mountains behind Kaephung.
Some 6,000 of these guns are in range of major South Korean population centers, according to a 2020 report by the RAND Corporation, a think tank funded by the US military. If a war broke out between the two Koreas, more than 205,000 people could be killed in Seoul, Incheon, Gimpo, and other South Korean cities within an hour, the RAND report estimated.
The Aegibong Peace Ecopark sits on the site of ‘Hill 154’, which was fiercely contested during the Korean War and changed hands multiple times throughout the three-year conflict. Owing to its proximity to the DMZ, visitors to the park must fill out an entry form and submit to a background check by the Korean Marine Corps.
According to the mayor of Gimpo, bringing Starbucks to the DMZ is a show of strength for the South, demonstrating the “robust security on the Korean Peninsula through the presence of this iconic capitalist brand.”
The cafe opened at a time of heightened tensions between the two Koreas. Earlier this year, Pyongyang began launching balloons filled with trash and excrement south over Gimpo and Seoul, in response to the South dropping propaganda leaflets into Northern territory. North Korea then announced that artillery units along the border had been placed on standby to “open fire,” before blowing up sections of road leading to South Korea last month.
Pyongyang claims to have severed the roads in response to repeated South Korean drone flights through its airspace, and overt joint US-South Korean military exercises earlier in the month. North Korea considers these exercises “provocative war drills for aggression,” the country’s Foreign Ministry said in a statement.
