It is one of history’s great architectural white elephants, a monument to the ambitions of a dictatorship that became a symbol of its incompetence and self-delusion. However, the Ryugyong Hotel in North Korea, the biggest construction site in the world, is to be finished as part of an effort to rejuvenate the country’s capital, Pyongyang.

For 16 years the 105-storey hotel has been the most prominent landmark in the city — a vast, windowless shell that was intended as an image of a modern, socialist paradise. Pictures of the 1,083ft (330m) pyramid, which would have contained 3,000 rooms and revolving restaurants, were printed on stamps and posters. But building work was abandoned in 1992.

Foreign tourists were steered away from it and the hotel was occasionally airbrushed out of official panoramas of the city. In the past few weeks, however, residents of Pyongyang have reported that work has resumed as North Koreans prepare for a series of national celebrations.

Glass has appeared in some of the thousands of empty windows, antennas have sprouted from its roof and an artist’s impression of the finished hotel has been put on display. The work is being carried out by Orascom, an Egyptian construction company, and estimates in the South Korean media of the cost of finishing the job range from $750 million (£379 million) to $2 billion.

Private aid organisations reported that parts of rural North Korea have faced food shortages and famine because of a lack of fertilisers this year but no glimpse of this hardship can be seen in Pyongyang, an isolated showcase where only the most politically reliable North Koreans are permitted to live. The renovation of the hotel is part of broader programme of beautification, which is widening the reality gap between Pyongyang and the rest of the country.

“The ‘Republic of Pyongyang’ is quite separate from the rest of North Korea,” said Erica Kang, of Good Friends, a South Korean charity that compiles reports from informers within North Korea. According to Good Friends, pavements, roads, restaurants and hotels are being improved in anticipation of foreign visitors on the back of the Beijing Olympics and the 60th anniversaries this autumn of North Korea and the Korean Workers’ Party.

It is unclear how much of the hotel structure will eventually be put to use because of the economic crisis.

— North Korea demanded yesterday that the US put aside its hostility to make progress on nuclear disarmament negotiations, after a meeting between Condoleezza Rice, the US Secretary of State, and Pak Ui Chun, the Foreign Minister of North Korea, at a gathering of Asian regional leaders in Singapore. Their meeting came amid signs of progress in moribund disarmament talks, which have led to the removal of North Korea from the US list of designated terrorist states. The breakthrough came last month when North Korea presented a declaration on the state of its nuclear programme.

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