Crowds of women stream across the Okryu Bridge in bright, traditional skirts. Men on bicycles carry bunches of paper flowers along the banks of the River Taedong. And in Kim Il Sung Square, beneath the vast portrait of the country’s departed president, 10,000 schoolchildren stand in rows, forming and re-forming themselves into giant human hieroglyphs.

Teams of men and women scrub the streets. The windows of government buildings are soaped and rinsed. And on Monday — after weeks of preparation that have closed schools and universities and diverted the resources of 100,000 people — the climax will arrive in a series of parades to mark the 60th anniversary of the Korean Workers’ Party.

Hundreds of thousands will rally before the late Kim Il Sung’s beaming son and successor, Kim Jong Il. The performances will be faultless, the acclaim for party and leader unanimous. They are a dramatisation of the virtues by which North Korea idealises itself: faultless co-ordination, invincible discipline and impregnable unity. But beneath the bombast, what is really going on in the world’s most isolated country?

Seven years ago, foreigners were predicting Kim Jong Il’s demise during a devastating famine that killed somewhere between a few hundred thousand and three million people.

But this autumn the Government is boasting of a bumper harvest that has put the country back on its feet. It has revived the state-run Public Distribution System, which largely collapsed after the famine of the late 1990s. And it has ordered the departure of international aid workers, who must choose to wind up their humanitarian work or leave it in the hands of government-appointed North Koreans.

Are these the signs of genuine confidence or a desperate attempt to fend off the inevitable? For two nights and three days, I looked for clues.

Even in an age of satellite spies in the sky, North Korea is the least known and most impenetrable country in the world, and the foreign media are treated with courteous suspicion.

Paul Rogers, the Times photographer, and I were accompanied everywhere by three minders and a driver, who mediated all our dealings with local people and were especially vigilant in vetoing the wrong kind of photograph (no shots from inside a car, no photography of soldiers or anything deemed “unpleasant”). Their anxieties were difficult to understand, for Pyongyang is a model city inhabited by model citizens.

Its gardens and immaculate wide boulevards are filled with immense monuments to Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il, and unencumbered by traffic or litter. Residence in Pyongyang is available only to the authorised elite and all questions are answered according to a simple principle: that everything in North Korea is perfect, and that responsibility for this lies wholly with the Great and the Dear Leaders, President Kim Il Sung and Chairman Kim Jong Il. “I feel pride in the Korean nation, ” Zi Ryong Ho told me after an admittedly astonishing performance of the dance, gymnastics and sloganeering routine known as Aririang. “This (performance) was first created by Chairman Kim Jong Il, so I am grateful to Chairman Kim Jong Il.”

Tickets for this extravaganza cost us, as foreigners, $150 each; the cheapest price for Koreans is 500 won, which may be only 18 cents but still amounts to several days’ wages.“It should be more expensive,” Mr Zi said.

The ultimate expression of Kimolatry came during dinner with one of our minders, an elderly and genial fellow named Mr Kim. “Have you enjoyed your food?” he asked. “Then may I show you something disgusting?” He raised his shirt to display lengthy surgical scars from a life-saving operation on his pancreas. “When Chairman Kim Jong Il heard that I was sick he did everything to help me recover,” he explained. “It was a miracle.”

Money is perhaps the biggest mystery of all in North Korea, and one of the keys to divining its future. With the abandonment of classical communism by its allies, Russia and China, the country lost the overseas customers and aid providers that had kept its economy afloat.

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