Last week, North Korean officials announced that the body of recently deceased leader Kim Jong Il would be permanently enshrined at Kumsusan Memorial Palace in the capital of Pyongyang. This act will give new meaning to the term “eternal leader.”
There is, however, historical precedent for this — an exclusive club of former dictators and world leaders whose bodies go on even as their lives don’t.
Vietnam’s Ho Chi Minh has been on display for more than 30 years, as has Mao Zedong, the Communist Party leader of China, whose embalmers reportedly learned their preservation techniques from the Vietnamese, who had learned them from the Russians. English thinker Jeremy Bentham represents one of the few modern nonpolitical or nonreligious figures to receive the honor of postmortem display; he’s been sitting in London’s University College for more than 150 years. His head is wax now, though. The original mummification process in the 19th century went awry. It made his head look like a dried fig — go ahead, Google it — and said head was repeatedly stolen by pranking college students. Now, it’s tucked away in a safe in the archaeology department.
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“Now, with typical embalming, in non-traumatized conditions, one would expect a body to be in good condition for weeks or even months,” Vernie Fountain says. He runs the Fountain National Academy of Professional Embalming Skills, which international students attend to learn the newest ways to make the dead look like the living. He is the National Funeral Directors Association’s go-to person on issues regarding body preservation.
What is happening with Kim is not, however, a typical embalming. The man is not being prepared for a viewing and burial (his funeral was in December) but rather for generations of glass-encased display.
Fountain ponders this problem. “You need some humidity. But not too much. A little less than 10 percent can help retard mold growth. I would expect that at some point in time, they’ll do touch-up work and re-preservation.”
Naturally. The proper amount of care does a body good. Consider Russian leader Vladimir Lenin, who has been lying in state since he died in 1924. Visitors can stream in between 10 a.m. and 1 p.m.
“I’ve seen Lenin,” says Mary Roach, author of the modern death encyclopedia “Stiff.” “You have about 30 seconds to pretend to be paying your respects, when really you’re thinking, ‘How did they do that?’ You cannot embalm someone and have them look so good. There had to be some kind of Lenin Pledge Wax going on there.”
Some kind of something — though for decades nobody knew what it was. In 1999, the caretakers of the body published a book. “Lenin’s Embalmers” revealed the regimen, which included applications of mild bleach, a steady temperature of 61 degrees and prolonged soaks in glycerol and potassium acetate.
Lacking that knowledge in the 1950s, though, Argentines came up with their own technique.
“One mummy that people don’t talk much about is Evita Peron,” says Bob Brier, an Egyptologist who was so intrigued by ancient mummification techniques that he demonstrated them on a human cadaver now on exhibit at a San Diego museum. “The technique — they essentially removed all of the water in her cells and replaced them with wax. Basically, they turned her into a candle.”
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