The Fight Over Lee Kuan Yew’s House
Asia Pacific|Why Singapore’s First Family Is Locked in a Bitter Feud Over a House
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/11/world/asia/singapore-lee-kuan-yew-house.html
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A son of the country’s founding father says he has been persecuted by the government because of a feud with his older brother, who until May was prime minister.
By Sui-Lee Wee
Sui-Lee Wee interviewed members of the Lee family as well as relatives and close family friends, and reviewed more than 1,000 pages of emails between the siblings and their statements to ministers.
The bungalow was built for a Dutch trader in colonial times, but it has become part of modern Singaporean lore. It was where Lee Kuan Yew lived for decades, where he started his political party and where he began building Singapore into one of the richest countries in the world.
Mr. Lee had said that he wanted the house to be demolished after he died rather than preserved as a museum, with the public “trampling” through his private quarters.
But the wording of his will left the property’s fate in limbo and caused a rift between his three children — one that reflects an intensifying debate over Singapore’s semi-authoritarian political system.
Now, an extraordinary voice has joined those who complain that the city-state’s prosperity has come at the cost of a government that lacks accountability: one of Mr. Lee’s own children.
“The idea that one good man at the center can control this, and you just rely on his benevolence to ensure that everything is right, doesn’t work,” Lee Hsien Yang, the youngest child, who wants to honor his father’s wishes for the house, said in a recent interview with The New York Times from London.
After Lee Kuan Yew’s death in 2015, the eldest child, by then Singapore’s prime minister, argued that his father’s instructions for the bungalow were ambiguous. His siblings wanted it demolished, though one continued to live in the house, and as long as she did, its fate remained unresolved.