Singapore’s Most Famous Home Poses Fresh Headache for New PM
(Bloomberg) -- Barely six months into his premiership, Singapore Prime Minister Lawrence Wong is confronting a fresh political headache over an unlikely issue: a colonial-era bungalow feuded over by the children of the city-state’s revered former leader, Lee Kuan Yew.
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The future of the home at 38 Oxley Road near Singapore’s central shopping district is in contention again following the death this week of Lee Wei Ling, the 69-year-old neurologist and daughter of Lee, the country’s first prime minister.
Her passing threatens to reignite a bitter — and very public — fight over the fate of a house that dates back to 1898. The elder Lee urged his children and the government to demolish the eight-bedroom, two-story house after his passing in 2015, because he didn’t want his private home of seven decades to become a public monument.
“I’ve told the Cabinet, when I’m dead, demolish it,” Lee said in a 2011 interview for a book.
The debate over whether to carry out that request long pitted Wei Ling and her brother Lee Hsien Yang — who owns the bungalow — against their elder brother, Lee Hsien Loong, who led Singapore for nearly two decades before stepping down in May.
In a Facebook post this week, Lee Hsien Yang said the family would have a private funeral for his sister. And he published what he said was a final remark from her on the dispute over their father’s home: “Please honor my father by honoring his wish for his home to be demolished.“
It was the latest salvo in a long battle.
Lee Hsien Loong said on social media that 2015 was the year “a shadow fell between my siblings and me.” Two years later, the younger siblings accused their eldest brother, then serving as Singapore’s third prime minister, of maneuvering to undermine their father’s instructions, in part through the creation of a ministerial committee exploring options for the property.
That’s where the current prime minister, Lawrence Wong, comes in.
As a minister of national development at the time, Wong was part of that committee, which published a report in 2018 laying out three options for the Oxley house: demolition, retaining it as a national monument, or preserving just the basement dining room — where debates over the founding of the long-ruling People’s Action Party took place.
But the committee punted on a final decision, pointing out that Lee’s daughter, the recently-deceased Wei Ling, was “likely to continue residing there for the foreseeable future.”
Now that move could come back to haunt Wong, who has been busy trying to bolster the economy and navigate stormy US-China relations ahead of elections that must be called by late 2025.
While the bungalow is owned by Hsien Yang, Singapore’s laws empower a minister to make a preservation order for a property designated as a monument, subject to a government board that can consider objections from the property’s owners and occupiers.
Lee Hsien Loong said in 2018 that he’d be willing to recuse himself from any future decision, hoping the government would “make an informed decision that both respects my father’s wishes and is in the public interest.”
Teo Chee Hean, a senior minister for Wong who chaired the committee in 2018 as then-deputy prime minister, said in an emailed statement to Bloomberg that “it is not appropriate to comment on this issue at this time” as it is a “very difficult period” for the family of Wei Ling.
Ultimately, the interests of Lee’s youngest children may be impossible to reconcile with their older brother and the government.
Colonial Outpost
Though he burnished a “man of the people” image, Lee Kuan Yew is inseparably linked to Singapore’s rapid rise from a British colonial outpost to one of the world’s top financial capitals. His 2015 funeral was attended by 2,200 people, including Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, then-Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and former US President Bill Clinton.
His legendary status makes any decision about the home even more fraught. A letter the elder Lee sent in 2011 hinted that he knew there would be a difficult debate over his wishes.
After acknowledging “unanimous” feedback from the cabinet at the time that his house “should not be demolished as I wanted,” Lee wrote that the another option was to just treat it as any private home.
It should be refurbished and “must then be let out for people to live in,” he wrote. “An empty building will soon decline and decay.”
--With assistance from Chanyaporn Chanjaroen.
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