In early 2019, the Chinese shipping company Ningbo Marine had a problem: it had absorbed another firm’s ships, but many of Zhejiang Fuxing Shipping’s assets were too old to be seaworthy. So in May that year, Ningbo Marine decided to auction five off for scrap.

Now one of those ships — the Ming Zhou 6 — has resurfaced as the DPRK-flagged Tae Phyong 2 at the North Korean port of Haeju. At 27,370 deadweight tons, it’s one of the largest and newest additions to Pyongyang’s fleet. 

According to automatic identification system (AIS) data from MarineTraffic, the first