Hanoi: North Korean leader Kim Jong Un paid tribute to Vietnam’s late revolutionary leader Ho Chi Minh on Saturday before starting his long journey home through China, after his Hanoi summit with US President Donald Trump ended without a nuclear deal.
Kim boarded his olive green armoured train at the Dong Dang border station in Vietnam before it rolled northward toward China en route to Pyongyang, kicking off a marathon 4,000 kilometre (2,500 mile) journey expected to take two and a half days. Earlier Kim made a highly unusual stop at the stark concrete monument where the body of Vietnam’s independence hero is on display.
On historic North Korean anniversaries Kim regularly pays tribute — with the “humblest reverence”, according to the official KCNA news agency — to his predecessors, his father Kim Jong Il and grandfather Kim Il Sung, at the sprawling memorial palace on the outskirts of Pyongyang where their preserved remains lie in state.
But he is not known to have previously done anything similar for a foreign leader. The North Korean adjusted the ribbons on a large wreath emblazoned with his name and the message “Cherishing the memory of President Ho Chi Minh” before bowing his head for no less than 48 seconds.
Kim has visited China, the North’s key diplomatic protector and main provider of trade and aid, four times but there have been no reports in either country’s state media of him going to Mao Zedong’s mausoleum in Beijing. But Kim’s grandfather was a close friend of Ho Chi Minh and supplied him with fighter pilots and psychological warfare specialists during his war against the US-backed regime in South Vietnam.
Pictures of the two together are displayed on the noticeboard outside the Vietnamese mission in Pyongyang. Kim’s trip to Vietnam was the first by a North Korean leader since 1964, when Kim Il Sung also travelled by rail for his journey to the southeast Asian nation.