TV footage showed crowds dressed in their best clothes packing the streets of Pyongyang as the torch began its 20-kilometer (12 mile) relay route. It was the first time the Olympic flame had been carried in North Korea.

“Cheer for Beijing, Cheer for Pyongyang and Cheer for the Olympic Games,” read one banner.

The relay finished on time at 0600 GMT when former marathon champion Jong Song-ok kindled the Olympic cauldron in the Kim Il-sung Stadium, named after the nation’s founding president, China’s Xinhua news agency reported.

“Holding the last torch and running to the cauldron reminded me of making a final dash in the marathon,” Jong told Xinhua. She won the event at the 1999 World Athletics Championships.

Spectators burst into a storm of applause when the relay ended, Xinhua said, estimating the total number of relay spectators in the hundreds of thousands.

In some other cities the event has sparked rowdy protests against China’s policies on Tibet and other issues. North Korea, a hardline communist state, clamps down sharply on dissent.

Reclusive leader Kim Jong-il was absent from the launch ceremony at the Tower of the Juche Idea. Juche or self-reliance is the impoverished state’s guiding ideology.

But Kim “is paying great interest in the success of the Olympic torch relay,” Pak Hak-son, chairman of the country’s Olympic committee, was quoted by Japan’s Kyodo News as saying.

“We express our basic position that while some impure forces have opposed China’s hosting of the event and have been disruptive, we believe that consists of a challenge to the Olympic idea,” Pak said.

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