When Kim Jong Un came to power in 2011, many observers focused on his schooling in Switzerland as a hopeful sign that he would reform North Korea and establish better relations with the West. This hypothesis now appears to have had missed the mark by a fairly wide margin.

However, it is little known that Kim Jong Un was not the first of the Kim family dynasty to study abroad. His father Kim Jong Il actually studied English in the former British colony of Malta in the early 1970s.