le, which stands about one metre (three feet) high and holds six wooden cups on a wooden tray.
Another striking present is a fiercely anti-US painting from former Cambodian king Norodom Sihanouk that was given to Kim Il-Sung in 1970.
The painting shows brooms labelled with the French names of China, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam and Korea sweeping a US soldier, who is tumbling upside down and screaming in agony with a US flag in tatters next to him.
Libyan leader Moamer Kadhafi gave a metre-long golden sword in 1986 and former Tanzanian president Julius Nyerere in 1969 delivered a live zebra, a photo of which hangs in one of the exhibition’s long hallways.
A guide who took a group of foreign journalists through the exhibition recently said Kim Jong-Il continues to receive about 2,000 gifts each year.
However the days of national leaders raining presents on him and his father appear to have ended with the fall of the Iron Curtain in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
Vast rooms showcasing gifts from 2003 and 2004 reveal an undoubtedly expensive array of presents that include carved blocks of jade, computers, furniture and gold-plated mobile phones, but most are from Chinese and South Korean business people and companies.
One display from the 2004 room hints at desperation – a rug with Kim Jong-Il’s face hangs on a wall next to a plaque that says: “From a citizen of Uzbekistan”.
Nevertheless, the exhibition hall remains an integral vehicle in maintaining the personality cults of the Kims, who have been relentlessly portrayed for decades as near God-like heroes of the nation.
Foreign visitors to the exhibition are not spared from paying their respects to Kim Il-Sung, with government minders bringing them to a room where they are greeted by a disturbingly realistic wax figure of a smiling Kim Il-Sung.
One of the minders asks scruffy journalists to tuck their clothes in, then ushers them to within a couple of metres of Kim with a quiet order: “Please bow before him”.
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