Blaine Harden, "Escape from Camp 14" — Maps

A map for the Ukrainian edition of Blaine Harden's Escape from Camp 14 (Bearded Tamarin, 2024), the story of Shin Dong-hyuk's escape from a North Korean political prison camp. With no usable source data, the camp was mapped from scratch in JOSM and assembled in QGIS — the first detailed map of Camp 14 in any edition of the book.

A map for the Ukrainian edition of Blaine Harden’s Escape from Camp 14, published by Bearded Tamarin (2024), translated by Oleksandr Krasiuk.

Between 150,000 and 200,000 people are held in political prison camps in North Korea — a system that has outlasted the Soviet gulags by twice their span, and from which only a handful have escaped. Shin Dong-hyuk is one of them. Born inside Kaechon, a camp for political prisoners and their descendants known as Camp 14, he knew nothing of life beyond it: raised by guards to inform on others, he saw his own mother as a rival for food and witnessed the execution of his family — and considered all of it normal, until he escaped, first from the camp and then from North Korea. An international bestseller translated into 27 languages, the book is a chilling account of endurance and survival.

On mapping the camp. North Korea is among the hardest regions to map: data is scarce, the state is closed, and the territory is largely undocumented. With no usable source material, the camp and its surroundings were mapped from scratch in JOSM using Bing and ESRI imagery — drawing on long experience as an OpenStreetMap contributor — then assembled in QGIS into the first detailed map of Camp 14. The original edition carries only schematics; this is the first detailed cartographic treatment of the camp in any edition of the book worldwide.

Available on the publisher’s website.

Published 2024 · 320 pages · 13.Published 2024 · 320 pages · 13.5 × 21 cm · Ukrainian · ISBN 978-617-8154-04-2

Detailed map of Camp-14