Mount Paektu National Park

Mount Paektu (Paekdu or Baekdu in Korean, Changbaishan or Baitoushan in Chinese) is an active stratovolcano of 2,744 m lying exactly on the border between the North Korean province of Ryanggang and the Chinese province of Jilin. It is the highest summit on the Korean peninsula and in the whole of north-eastern China, and its caldera is occupied by Lake Chon, or Tianchi, the deepest crater lake in the world: between 12 and 14 km in circumference, 213 m of average depth and up to some 384 m at its deepest, frozen from mid-October to mid-June.

Sixteen peaks exceed 2,500 m on the caldera rim; the highest, Janggun, stays snow-covered for some eight months of the year. The slope is relatively gentle up to 1,800 m. Water leaves the lake to the north and forms a 70 m waterfall shortly afterwards. Paektu is the source of three great rivers — the Songhua, the Tumen and the Yalu — and the central sector of the mountain is rising some 3 mm a year as magma ascends. Its eruption of the year 946, known as the Millennium Eruption, was one of the largest of the Holocene.

The vegetation is tiered by altitude, from deciduous forest and mixed Korean pine forest (Pinus koraiensis) to coniferous forest, dwarf birch and the alpine tundra of the upper levels. The North Korean side was registered in 1989 as the country's first biosphere reserve in UNESCO's MAB network, and in 2025 UNESCO's Executive Board designated it a Global Geopark, the first North Korean natural site on that list. Paektu also carries an enormous symbolic charge on both sides of the Korean border: it is the setting of the founding myth of Tangun and, in the DPRK, the axis of the official narrative about the Kim lineage.