The saga of 38 Oxley Road, near Singapore’s prestigious Orchard Road, appears to be over. The Singapore government has decreed that the house will be preserved as a shrine to Lee Kuan Yew, independent Singapore’s founder and first prime minister.Stunningly, as an indication of the rancor, it was a dispute in which former Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong appears to have brought down the power of the government to intervene in a family clash in which the decision to preserve the house has precipitated a bitter implosion in one of Asia’s most illustrious families, a rupture that is unlikely to ever be repaired.Lee Hsien Yang, Hsien Loong’s brother, retired as a brigadier general and later CEO of Singtel, a leading Singaporean telecommunications carrier. He is now in self-exile in the United Kingdom with his wife Lee Suet Fern, a distinguished lawyer and founder of Stamford Law Corporation, a leading Singaporean law firm, and president of the Inter-Pacific Bar Association. Because of the fight over the mansion, she was suspended from practicing law for 15 months. Both she and her husband were charged with allegedly giving false evidence in a case involving the handling of the father’s final will.Their eldest son, Li Shengwu, is a professor of economics at Harvard University in the US and unlikely to ever move back to Singapore. The third sibling, Lee Wei Ling, a neurologist and former director of Singapore’s National Neuroscience Institute, died in 2024 holding onto an implacable will to fulfill her father’s wish to have the house demolished. Title to the house passed into Hsien Yang’s hands on her death. That didn’t stop the government from gazetting it for a monument.Prominent families often fall victim to secrecy in the face of intense external pressure to maintain a perfect public image – especially in Singapore, a city state that prides itself on its Asian exceptionalism – and “empty shell” dynamics where honest communication completely stops. Relatives switch destructively between being emotional family members and objective business stakeholders, crippling family dynamics. But in this case, whatever the pressures in the family, it came apart over the patriarch’s home.The acrimonious, years-long feud escalated into a public rift in 2017, with the siblings accusing Hsien Loong of going against their father’s final wishes. He died on March 23, 2015, with the feud between the siblings going public in June 2017 with a joint statement on Facebook by Wei Ling and Hsien Yang, which stated they did not trust Hsien Loong (who was then Singapore’s prime minister) “as a brother or as a leader.” Lee Hsien Yang, fearing arrest, fled to live in self-imposed exile abroad. Any hopes for reconciliation may have permanently been closed.“Today, the PAP government has seized control of 38 Oxley Road,” he wrote on Facebook on July 31. “My father’s wish was crystal clear: demolish his home. Wei Ling and I sought to honor his wish, as the executors of his will. The compulsory acquisition of his home is a repudiation of his values and a flagrant disregard for his long-held wish. No amount of sophistry can disguise this fact.”By most accounts, Lee wanted the house destroyed to keep it from turning into a shrine to his efforts to turn Singapore into a modern economic powerhouse, becoming an international statesman in the process. In 2011, Lee, in an interview, told reporters he wanted the distinguished black and white mansion demolished after his death or kept as a closed residence for his family and descendants, a view he repeated in his memoirs and writings and in his first will published that year.That same year, government officials debated whether to conserve the house for historical reasons. Although the patriarch met with the cabinet and told them the house should be demolished, the cabinet, then headed by Hsien Loong, informally decided that it should be due to its historic significance. In later discussions with the family, Lee Kuan Yew is quoted by Hsien Loong in a parliamentary debate as agreeing to preserve the building. In early 2012, Ho Ching, the wife of Hsien Loong and then head of the sovereign wealth fund Temasek, emailed the family with detailed plans about how the house would be renovated. Ho said that if there were objections to renting out the house after it was renovated, Hsien Loong’s family could move in with Wei Ling, who was granted the right to live in the house after Lee’s 2014 death until she herself died or moved out.“We have observed that Hsien Loong and Ho Ching want to milk Lee Kuan Yew’s legacy for their own political purposes. We also believe, based on our interactions, that they harbor political ambitions for their son, Li Hongyi,” alleged the statement by Wei Ling and Hsien Yang. “Lee Kuan Yew believed that Hsien Loong and Ho Ching were behind what was represented to the family as a government initiative to preserve the house.”Hsien Loong has denied any wrongdoing. Hongyi previously said he has no interest in politics. Hsien Loong has said he would not sue his siblings for libel out of respect for their late parents. Although Lee Kuan Yew is revered by many Singaporeans as the father of the nation, critics have faulted Lee senior’s propensity to sue opposition politicians and international media for defamation.In fact, the case has bled into Singapore politics, featuring debate in parliament and with Home Affairs Minister K Shanmugam and Singapore Foreign Minister Vivian Balakrishnan collecting more than S$600,000 (US$468,000) from Hsien Yang for defaming the two in an earlier Facebook post about their rental of two huge heritage houses. The two ministers sued Hsien Yang for libel in 2023, after Hsien Yang accused them in a Facebook post of getting the Singapore Land Authority to grant them preferential treatment in renting the dwellings. No Singaporean official has ever lost a defamation case in the island republic.There the matter stands, with three of the Lees in what appears to be permanent exile and with the government saying that “to balance heritage with privacy, the government plans to alter the interior, including removing private living areas, rather than preserving the house exactly as the Lee family knew it.” Lee Hsien Yang remains defiant, criticizing the state’s action, reiterating that it disregards his father’s explicit, long-held wish for the property’s demolition.