BANGKOK – Thailand is putting the finishing touches this month to a lavish five-day funeral ceremony in a final goodbye to its late King Bhumibol Adulyadej, who helped shape the South-east Asian nation for decades after World War Two.

Many of the hundreds of thousands of black-clad mourners are expected to camp for days near Bangkok’s Grand Palace to capture a good view of the ceremonies, which will be guarded by 78,000 police officers and culminate in the cremation on Oct 26.

“October is a sad period,” Prime Minister Prayut Chan-o-cha, who announced plans for a national election next year, told reporters in the capital on Tuesday. “I ask that politicians and political parties be peaceful and orderly.”

Artisans have worked for ten months in Bangkok’s ancient quarter to build an elaborate cremation site fashioned after a vision of heaven, where Thais believe dead royals return to live above Mount Meru, a golden mountain in Hindu mythology.

The funeral of King Bhumibol, who died on Oct 13 last year after seven decades on the throne, is also a time of uncertainty for some Thais, said a Thailand-based analyst, who declined to be identified because of sensitivities around the monarchy.

“In many ways the king was Thailand and his death has left a huge vacuum in the Thai psyche,” said the analyst, pointing to social and political upheavals in recent decades.

“What happens after his funeral? Where will Thailand head next? These are profound questions that must be answered.”

ANCIENT TRADITIONS

The late king was succeeded by his son, King Maha Vajiralongkorn, or Rama X, who has overseen sweeping changes to the royal household, including the running of palace finances.

Though steeped in ancient traditions, the funeral of King Bhumibol will permit more public participation than those of previous kings, said Thai monarchy expert Tongthong Chandransu.

“A strong bond has been formed between the people and the monarchy – the strongest compared to past reigns,” Tongthong told Reuters. “So we can see more people participate in the royal funeral of this king.”

Among the many royal objects restored for the funeral is a golden chariot that will carry the king’s body in a giant ornate urn to the cremation site.

The urn will move to the Royal Crematorium before the cremation on the night of Oct 26, which has been declared a national holiday.

More than 3,000 performers will join in a night-long final tribute of music and puppet shows to end a year of mourning.

Thais devoted to the memory of the king have folded paper flowers for his cremation, making 10 million in Bangkok alone, city authorities said.

“This is our ‘Mandela’, or our ‘Princess Diana’, moment,” said graphic designer and self-proclaimed royalist Apichai Klapiput.

“What the world will see is rivers of tears that show how much Thais love King Bhumibol Adulyadej. He was the people’s king.”

In the seaside city of Wonsan, North Korean families cook up barbecues on the beach, go fishing, and eat royal jelly flavor ice cream in the summer breeze. For their leader Kim Jong Un, the resort is a summer retreat, a future temple to tourism, and a good place to test missiles.

He is rebuilding the city of 360,000 people and wants to turn it into a billion-dollar tourist hotspot. At the same time, he has launched nearly 40 missiles from the area, as part of his accelerated tests of North Korea’s nuclear deterrent.

“It may sound crazy to outsiders to fire missiles from a place he wants to develop economically, but that’s how Kim Jong Un runs his country,” said Lim Eul-chul, an expert on the North Korean economy at Kyungnam University in South Korea.

This combination of tourism and nuclear weapons is emblematic of Kim Jong Un’s strategy for survival, say researchers and people familiar with the project.

North Korea’s development plans for Wonsan have mushroomed since they were first announced in 2014. Examined here in detail for the first time, they run across 160 pages in nearly 30 brochures produced by the Wonsan Zone Development Corporation in Korean, Chinese, Russian and English in 2015 and 2016.

Tourism is one of a shrinking range of North Korean cash sources not targeted by United Nations sanctions, and the brochures advertise to foreign investors some $1.5 billion (S$2.03 billion) worth of potential ventures in the Wonsan Special Tourist Zone, an area covering more than 400 square km (150 square miles). Kim has already constructed a ski resort and a new airport there.

According to one brochure, the Zone includes approximately 140 historical relics, 10 sand beaches, 680 tourist attractions, four mineral springs, several bathing resorts and natural lakes and “more than 3.3 million tons of mud with therapeutic properties for neuralgia and colitis.”

The projects that Kim is inviting investors to help build include a $7.3 million department store, a $197 million city centre development, and a $123 million golf course (including a $62.5 million fee to lease the land).

Earlier this year Kim sent 16 of his officials to Spain to get ideas for Wonsan. They visited Marina d’Or, one of the Mediterranean country’s biggest holiday complexes, and the Terra Mitica (Mythical Land) theme park in Benidorm. Terra Mitica caters to fans “of extreme sensations,” according to its website.

“They saw such places with their own eyes and filmed some of them,” said a spokesman at the North Korean embassy in Madrid. Both parks confirmed the visits; a spokeswoman for Terra Mitica said the North Koreans were impressed by its themes including the ancient civilizations of Egypt, Greece and Rome.

No major foreign partner has said they will back Kim’s Wonsan projects. The new airport, completed in 2015, has yet to open to international flights. America recently banned its citizens from visiting North Korea. International sanctions now ban all joint ventures with the state.

Even so, the plan is strategically vital for Kim, say former North Korean diplomats. When he came to power in 2011, he inherited a society officially run by the military but whose people survived largely on black market dealings. On paper, North Korea is a state-run economy; but in fact, seven in 10 North Koreans depend on private trade to live, according to Thae Yong Ho, North Korea’s former deputy ambassador in London, who staged a high-profile defection with his family in 2016.

Kim is perceived by outsiders as all powerful, but North Korea’s free marketeers make him more vulnerable than he seems, Thae told Reuters. The leader is looking for a way to harness both military and market forces to survive.

Nuclear weapons are one part of his answer because Kim hopes they will cost less to maintain than North Korea’s conventional heavy weapons. Projects like Wonsan are the other part. He wants to cut the share of funding he gives to the military and allocate more money to the civilian economy.

“Kim Jong Un knows that he can only control society and guarantee his long leadership if his role and influence in the economy is increased,” said Thae.

FRIENDLY

North Korea wants to attract more than 1 million tourists every year in the near term and around 5 million to 10 million tourists “in the foreseeable future,” the Wonsan brochures say. The Wonsan Zone Development Corporation, the North Korean state body which oversees the project, did not respond to requests for comment.

There are no up-to-date statistics on current visitors to North Korea. China said more than 237,000 Chinese visited in 2012 but it stopped publishing the statistics in 2013. For comparison, 8 million Chinese visited South Korea in 2016.

The Korea Maritime Institute, a think-tank in the South, estimates that tourism generates about $44 million in annual revenue for North Korea about 0.8 per cent of the country’s GDP. About 80 per cent of all North Korea’s foreign tourists are Chinese, it says. Westerners and Russians make up the rest.

The Wonsan brochures are welcoming. “Officials and residents of this zone have a good understanding of tourism and are friendly towards tourists,” one says.

The brochures also disclose some unusual details about vacation habits in the totalitarian state.

Not far from the proposed $123 million golf course, the plans show an existing compound. It is labelled in the brochure as the summer retreat of the State Security Department or “Bowibu” the entity which runs North Korea’s six prison camps and conducts nationwide surveillance of ordinary citizens.

Just next door to that beachfront property, the Daesong General Bureau the body also known as “Office 39” that procures luxury goods for the Kim family has its retreat.

A third compound is reserved for the Korean National Insurance Corporation, a state insurance company that the European Union says is involved in insurance fraud.

All three entities are subject to international sanctions because of their role in funneling cash into Kim’s nuclear and missile programmes.

For Kim’s security forces, though, Wonsan is about more than fun in the sun.

Kim brought his top military brass to Wonsan in 2014. On the white sandy beach of his palace compound, he ordered his highest admirals to strip into bathing costumes and, as a test of their ability, swim 10 km around the bay, state TV showed. It filmed him at a desk on the sand, shaded by a white parasol.

In April this year, Kim used the beach near Wonsan’s new airport to unleash an artillery drill described by state media as the country’s largest ever. In it, “300 large-calibre self-propelled guns” opened fire at a white target painted on a small island 3 km away.

The bombardment, broadcast on state TV, turned that island into a dusty moonscape.

PLASTIC FLOWERS

Wonsan holds symbolic power for the Kim dynasty: It was there that Kim Jong Un’s grandfather Kim Il Sung, who helped found North Korea at the end of Japanese colonial rule in 1945, first landed with Soviet troops to take over the country.

Statues of North Korea’s two former leaders stand on the quayside, where tourists are expected to bow and buy plastic flowers to offer them. Next door to the Kim family palace, the Songdowon Children’s Camp has welcomed “Young Pioneers” from Soviet-backed countries for decades, according to state media.

When the young Kim was picked as heir to Kim Jong Il in 2009, he had few achievements to his name, noted Kim Young-Hui, who heads a team of North Korea researchers at Korea Development Bank in Seoul. If he can develop Wonsan the place where his grandfather helped bring North Korea into existence it will seal his image as a master builder.

“He has strong political reasons to develop Wonsan,” she said. She is a native of the city and defected to South Korea in 2002.

People from Wonsan, even those who have defected, say they have largely happy memories of the place. Wonsan’s karaoke bars and billiard clubs have a more reliable supply of electricity than much of North Korea, they say.

They recall young couples roller skating in a big square near the Wonsan waterfront.

The city has a special place in Kim’s heart, says Michael Spavor, a Canadian consultant who shared Long Island Iced Teas with Kim on board one of his private boats in 2013, after they had been jet-skiing in the bay.

“He told me about … redeveloping and improving the whole city for the people and … attracting international tourists and businessmen to the area,” said Spavor, who runs the Paektu Cultural Exchange, which conducts economic research in North Korea.

NO BELT-TIGHTENING

Official history has not disclosed Kim’s birthplace, but many people from Wonsan believe he was born there, partly because he spent his early years at the palace.

An anecdote from that time gives a flavour of life inside the Kim family residence. One day, the Japanese family chef, Kenji Fujimoto, recounted in his memoirs, the future leader made an unusual remark.

“Hey, Fujimoto!” a young Kim said to the chef. “We ride horses every day, go rollerblading, play basketball, and in the summer we jet ski or play in the pool. But how do ordinary people live?” Fujimoto, who published the book in 2010, now runs a sushi restaurant in Pyongyang and could not be reached.

For years under Kim Jong Il, North Korea, backed by the Soviet Union and China, had officially provided everything for its people.

The political model then was known as “songun” military first, which held that the Korean People’s Army was the first in line for resources and the infallible provider to fix the country’s economic problems. The “million-man army” would swap Kalashnikovs for shovels and set to work building roads, dams and housing.

After the Soviet Union collapsed in the 1990s, the entire nation, then 21 million people, suffered a famine that Kim Jong Il was eventually to call the “Arduous March.” The state was no longer able to provide food, or work. Between 200,000 and three million people died.

To survive, ordinary people were forced to look beyond the marshaled ranks on display at parades, and hustle for scraps on private markets, bribing officials to turn a blind eye to any illegality. For most people including the military it was hunger or trade.

When Kim the younger came to power, he said the time had come to “enable our people… to live without tightening their belts any longer.”

In 2013, he shifted the political rhetoric. His policy line, called “byungjin” or parallel development, harked back to his grandfather’s era. It also signaled the side-by-side advance of North Korea’s nuclear deterrent and a strong economy.

MAKE MONEY IN WONSAN

The latest available figures say North Korea spends a bigger share of its GDP on the military than any country in the world an average of 23 per cent between 2004 and 2014, according to the US State Department.

The Wonsan brochures promise healthy profits, including internal rates of return of between 14 per cent and 43 per cent. The $7.3 million Wonsan Department Store, for example, allows for foreign investors to hold a stake of up to 61.3 per cent. In return, it says, investors can expect to make $1.3 million net annual profit.

The brochures offer preferential conditions for foreign investors, saying their rights are protected by the state and they can remit funds abroad without any limitations. Land is available to them to lease, not to own, for 50 years, but investors can trade the leases.

Some of the projects are less generous. One offers the opportunity to cash in on the popularity of North Korean beer with an initial $2.4 million investment in a new Wonsan Brewery. The proposal says foreign investors will be subject to a 15 per cent transaction tax, a city management tax, an auto tax, plus other deductions.

Then there is income tax at 14 per cent. These deductions will nearly halve the projected annual profit, to $154,711.

For domestic investors North Korea officially has no tax, but experts say the state raises funds by collecting about 70 per cent of the profits of state enterprises.

A few of the proposals stretch the idea of tourism. They include an Offshore Farm to produce seafoods “of great economic value on an industrial basis, so as to satisfy the demands of tourists and export the products to the foreign market,” a lighting factory, a furniture factory, and a renovated Wonsan Fishing Tackle factory.

Its output will include 10,000 deep sea floats, 750 tonnes of ropes and 2,500 “lifesaving jackets for swimming.”

Since the plans were drawn up, the United Nations has tightened sanctions on North Korea to include a ban on seafood exports and curbs on joint ventures.

According to a brochure from 2015, foreign investor interest in the Wonsan project was “growing day by day.”

But a Westerner who attended an investment conference in Wonsan in 2015 said North Korean officials showed little understanding of investors’ needs. About 200 people, Chinese and Westerners, heard about investment prospects in the zone and were taken on a tour of the area.

“I thought I might be a witness to some actual pragmatism,” said Simon Cockerell of Beijing-based Koryo Tours. “But they simply went on about how amazing the opportunities were and couldn’t admit any weaknesses or that there may be any issues at all with the area or any of their plans.”

Han Jin-myung, a North Korean diplomat who was stationed in Vietnam until 2015 before defecting to South Korea, said he had been tasked with promoting the Wonsan scheme abroad and had little success: “We just ended up selling North Korean herbs and medicines instead.”

This article was first published in CNBC.

HONG KONG – Hong Kong will cut company profits tax to 8.25 per cent for the first HK$2 million (S$350,000) of earnings, Hong Kong’s Chief Executive Carrie Lam said in her maiden policy address on Wednesday (Oct 11) in which she laid out some of her priorities for the next five years.

The Hong Kong leader also said she would address the city’s astronomical housing prices by seeking to increase land supply and launch a new housing scheme to help families buy flats.

Hong Kong property prices, already amongst the world’s highest, have continued to rise over the past year despite the government implementing a raft of cooling measures.

Since taking office on July 1, Hong Kong’s first female leader has sought to heal social divisions amid growing tensions with China, and to forge a softer and more socially engaged leadership style than her predecessor, the staunchly pro-Beijing Leung Chun Ying.

Signs of vehicle movement and electricity use within the joint industrial park in the North Korean city of Kaesong have been detected since March, Seoul’s Unification Ministry revealed Tuesday, amid growing concerns over the North’s unilateral operation of the zone.

The ministry warned that the North should refrain from operating the complex without Seoul’s consent, stressing that South Korean firms hold the property rights to all factories and machines there.

“The government takes the basic stance that North Korea should not infringe on South Korean firms’ property rights,” said a ministry official Tuesday.

“We’ve made clear that all factories and machines in the zone belong to the companies here,” he added.

Buses were spotted entering and leaving the complex and lamp posts were seen used for the past six months, the ministry revealed. However, the resumption of operations at the industrial park are still only “suspected,” as there is insufficient evidence, stressed the ministry.

“Seoul plans to make a fact-finding effort to determine the situation. If local firms apply to visit North Korea to check their assets, the government will consider whether to approve their requests after gauging various factors,” the ministry official said.

The North’s resumption of the Kaesong industrial park would be clear violations of the inter-Korean agreements that guarantee South Korean firms’ assets and the latest UN sanctions targeting the North’s textile exports.

The US-backed Radio Free Asia recently reported that the North had started operating 19 textile factories within the complex. Reportedly, about 58 per cent of the South Korean companies there did textile-related businesses.

On Friday, North Korea’s propaganda outlet Uriminzokkiri hinted that North Korea had resumed operation of the Kaesong industrial park saying that “it’s nobody’s business” what it does in the zone, where its “sovereignty is exercised.” It also vowed to run the factories more actively and to show how its citizens are currently working “with confidence” there.

Another government official added that there is a possibility that North Korea may be using its own electricity to power the complex, as South Korea cut off all water and electricity supplies after closing the industrial park in February 2016.

Korea Electric Power Corp., South Korea’s state-run power provider said Tuesday that South Korea has not been providing electricity to the complex since its shutdown.

It said that the 124 local firms that had operations in the industrial park have not been paying their bills since they evacuated the complex last year, therefore it was logical for the state-run provider to suspend all supplies to the zone.

Meanwhile, South Korean operators who ran businesses and factories in the complex will hold a meeting and a press conference Wednesday to share their stance on the matter.

Kaesong industrial park was closed in 2016, under suspicions that revenue generated there was funding Pyongyang’s nuclear and missile programme development.

A 35-year-old man, who had earned public sympathy years ago for suffering a rare medical condition himself and raising a daughter with the same condition, admitted Tuesday to killing the daughter’s friend and dumping her body.

The man, surnamed Lee and arrested, made the confession during the third day of questioning, after his 14-year-old daughter testified to investigators that she heard her father say “I killed her (the victim.)”

Both Lee and his daughter are recovering from overdosing on sleeping pills in what appeared to be an attempted suicide.

Police said that they asked for an arrest warrant to detain his 14-year-old daughter as well for assisting her father to dispose of the victim’s body.

But the two did not elaborate on why and how the victim was murdered, according to the police.

According to media reports, police secured testimony from the daughter that she had lured her friend into her house and gave her sleeping pills to have her fall asleep. She then left the house alone, spent time with her other friends outside and came back home to find her friend dead. She allegedly said that it was her father who asked her to bring the friend home and asked her to be outside home for a while.

According to the police, the victim went into Lee’s house with Lee’s daughter at around 12:20 p.m. on Sept. 30. Lee’s daughter left the house alone at around 1 p.m. The next day, the father and daughter carried the dead body in a black suitcase in a car and abandoned it at a mountain in Yeongwol County, Gangwon Province.

The father, who has an intellectual and mental disability, has initially claimed that the girl died after she mistakenly took sleeping pills that he had kept at his home to take his own life out of despair following his wife’s death.

But the victim was strangled to death using a rope or similar implement, the autopsy report by the National Forensic Service found.

The case surfaced in early September when Lee and his wife, surnamed Choi, filed a complaint with the police against Lee’s 60-year-old step father who they claimed had raped Choi on multiple occasions for eight years since 2009.

Five days after they filed a complaint, the wife jumped off a five-story building and killed herself. She committed suicide after having a quarrel with Lee as he asked her to have sex with the step father to secure evidence for rape, an anonymous police official was quoted as saying.

The police are conducting a separate probe into the alleged rape case. They called in the step father as a suspect for questioning earlier in the day, but he refused to turn up.

Who Lee really is largely remains a mystery.

The 35-year-old man has earned a reputation for being a loving and caring father after local media reported on his effort to raise donations for her daughter, who was suffering from a hereditary tumour that causes disfigurement of the jaw and teeth, in the US in 2006.

He had the same condition as his daughter. After receiving numerous surgeries with the money from donations, he was left with only one molar tooth, earning him the nickname “Molar Daddy.”

But testimony by residents in his neighborhood and police suggest that Lee had shown abnormal behaviour such as shooting an hourlong video in which his deceased wife’s body was cleaned and shrouded.

“I am happy to touch my wife for the last time” and “My wife is the prettiest,” kissing her on the lips and breasts, he allegedly told reporters. On Choi’s body, there was a tattoo showing a woman tied in ropes.

Lee himself argued that he had owned a massage parlour in the affluent district of southern Seoul. There is suspicion that he has led a lavish lifestyle — for example, modifying foreign cars. He has not avoided meeting or talking to his neighbours, but when asked what he did for a living, he gave different answers every time, according to local residents.

The police said he had no stable income and lived on the donations raised for him and his daughter.