The Ryugyong Hotel is real. It stands in Pyongyang, 105 storeys, meant to be the world’s tallest hotel. Construction began on 28 August 1987; the building was topped out in 1992 and stood for years with no windows and no interior fittings; the exterior was finished on 14 July 2011. It has never opened. No guest has ever stayed. This page is the front desk. It takes reservations, checks them against the register, and replies.
The register has no entries. Every date you ask for, the desk will check; every date will come back the same. The reason is on the record, and the record is below. Try a date. Any date.
| Asked on | Arrival | Nights | Guests | Outcome |
|---|
The register is kept in this browser. The hotel’s own register has no entries, so this page keeps its own.
The Ryugyong Hotel was meant to be the world’s tallest hotel. It is 330 metres high, 105 storeys above ground and three below, in three wings that slope at 75 degrees to the ground and meet at a point. The top was designed as a truncated cone 40 metres wide, eight floors of it intended to rotate, with five revolving restaurants. The sources differ on the guest rooms: 3,000 by one count, 7,665 by another.
It stands in Ryugyong-dong, on the Potong River side of Pyongyang. Its name, capital of willows, is one of the old names of the city.
Before another unoccupied building passed it, the Ryugyong was described as the tallest unoccupied building in the world.
The desk is this page’s own. The building is real and the dates above are the record’s; the register, the replies and the wait are not. The page says so because the building cannot: it has never opened, so it has never had to explain itself.