Northeast Asia is home to the most bustling cargo-ship traffic in the world. And though much of that flows through the South China Seas, three of the planet’s top 10 busiest container ports—Busan, Qingdao, and Tianjin—are in the upper corner of sea flanked by China, Japan, and South Korea.
But the volley of port activity in the region almost entirely skirts the coasts of one country: North Korea, of course. This is particularly vividly illustrated in the map above, which plots cargo-ship traffic activity from MarineTraffic.com, as CityAM reports.
Not that this is especially surprising. Known as the Hermit Kingdom, the country of 25 million is notoriously walled off to foreign contact and trade. That’s largely thanks to the authoritarian rule of the Kim regime, which has directly stymied the country’s economic development while also inviting international sanctions forbidding shipments of things like weapons and luxury goods.
That’s not to say commerce isn’t happening at all, though. In 2013, the last year for which there was data, North Korea imported $4 billion in goods—mostly oil, machinery, and electronic equipment—and exported $3.3 billion in coal, apparel, metal, and a smattering of other goods, according to TradeMap.
Nearly all of that trade—90% of imports and 88% of exports—is with China.