ABSTRACT This paper examines the underlying factors that affected perceived value among South Korean tourists who visited the North Korean Mt Kumgang resort. Results identified emotional, functional and economic values as core elements that directly affected guest satisfaction, which influenced intentions to recommend and revisit. Seen as a peace tourism site when the Sunshine Policy of rapprochement guided inter-Korean strategy, we argue that the resort project is a heterotopia of comparison combining idealized cultural and contradictory political spaces in one place. Understanding this needs Korean ideas that lead to a thanatourism with an indigenous perspective, which is applicable to other non-Western thanatourism-like sites. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Received 3 January 2010; Revised 30 June 2010; Accepted 29 December 2010 Keywords: thanatourism; peace tourism; heterotopia; perceived value; Korean Peninsula. INTRODUCTION I n 2008, armed security personnel patrolled the boundaries of the Mt Kumgang resort in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea). During that year, a North Korean soldier shot and killed a mid- dle-aged female tourist from the Republic of Korea (South Korea) who had strayed into a forbidden area near to the resort (Kim, 2009). This tragedy stresses the complexity sur- rounding this resort that North Korea has labelled as a special tourism zone and the South Korean Hyundai Asan corporation has developed and managed. This paper provides analysis of data collected shortly before the resort closed following the shooting. Although previous research saw it as peace tourism and as an economic integration project (Yu and Chung, 2001; Cho, 2007; Kim et al., 2007), recent events need a fresh assessment of Mt Kumgang. We argue this occurs at a conver- gence of the Korean ideas of haan and Han (Son, 2000; Min, 2009), heterotopias of com- parison (Foucault, 1986) and thanatourism (Seaton, 2010). In 1998, under a ‘Sunshine Policy’ doctrine for improving inter-Korean relations, the South Korean government announced measures that stimulated economic cooperation, allowed South Korean companies to invest in North Korea and for their business executives to visit the North. It was in this political context that Hyundai chairman Ju-young Chung confirmed the agreement with North Korea on the Mt Kumgang tourism resort. When the destina- tion opened to non-North Koreans in 1998, Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF TOURISM RESEARCH Int. J. Tourism Res. 14, 71–90 (2012) Published online 11 February 2011 in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com) DOI: 10.1002/jtr.836 Thanatourism or Peace Tourism: Perceived Value at a North Korean Resort from an Indigenous Perspective Choong-Ki Lee, Lawrence J. Bendle, Yoo-Shik Yoon and Myung-Ja Kim College of Hotel and Tourism, Kyung Hee University, Seoul, South Korea *Correspondence to: Choong-Ki Lee, PhD, Professor, College of Hotel and Tourism, Kyung Hee University, 1, Hoegi-dong, Dongdaemun-ku, Seoul 130-701 South Korea. E-mail: cklee@khu.ac.kr