Aegukka
national anthem of North Korea
The national anthem of North Korea was known as Aegukka until 2024. It was composed in 1945 as a patriotic song celebrating independence from Japanese occupation and was adopted as the state anthem in 1947.
In 2023, Kim Jong Un announced an end to attempts at reunifying with South Korea. The following year, the song’s second line, “The country of three thousand ri,” was replaced to remove its reference to a unified Korean nation. Ri is the length of a Korean mile (equivalent to 0.24 imperial miles) and a reference to the length of the Korean peninsula.
The title was also changed to remove references to the South Korean patriotic song Aegukga. The text of the Constitution was altered to officially rename the anthem to the "National Anthem of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea" (조선민주주의공화국 국가).
Performance of this anthem is prohibited in South Korea under the National Security Act.
Etymology
"Aegukka" is a Romanized transliteration of "The Patriotic Song"; the song is also known by its incipit Ach'imŭn pinnara or "Let Morning Shine" or in its Korean name 아침은 빛나라 or alternatively as the "Song of a Devotion to a Country".
The Encyclopedia of Korean Culture defines the word "Aegukka" as "the song to wake up the mind to love the country".
“Aegukka” enters the record as national anthem of North Korea. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Aegukka, national and anthem can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 18, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q231910. None of the 2 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2024, 1945, 1947 and 2023.
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This entry incorporates text from “Aegukka” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.