The 18th-century poet Percy Bysshe Shelley famously told of a ruined statue depicting a once powerful king, its fragments buried in desolate desert sands. The vivid poem “Ozymandias” is often interpreted as a warning against the hubris of building monuments to one’s own greatness, as even the mightiest empires wane and eventually crumble.
The message is one that resonated with Singapore’s founding prime minister Lee Kuan Yew, whose relatives say he cited Shelley’s sonnet as he pondered his legacy. Prior to his death in March 2015 at age 91, the revered elder statesman publicly expressed his wish that his family’s five-bedroom residence at 38 Oxley Road be demolished after his passing.
This was to avoid the cost of preserving the historic colonial-era bungalow and the risk that it would fall into disrepair, with the political patriarch having once remarked how he detested the way the homes of national figures such as India’s founding prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru were left in “shambles” when converted into memorial tourist attractions.
What exactly the late premier wanted and stipulated in his will is at the heart of an acrimonious nearly six-year dispute that has bitterly divided Singapore’s most prominent family, a family feud between siblings that has become part and parcel of the prosperous city-state’s increasingly partisan politics.
Read the full story at Asia Times.
Nile Bowie is a journalist and correspondent with the Asia Times covering current affairs in Singapore and Malaysia. He can be reached at nilebowie@gmail.com.
