Singaporeans yesterday wept on the streets and queued in their thousands to pay tribute to founding father and former prime minister Lee Kuan Yew (李光耀) as his flag-draped coffin was transported on a gun carriage to parliament for public viewing.
After a two-day private wake for the family, the coffin was taken in a slow motorcade from the Istana government complex, Lee’s workplace for decades as prime minister and Cabinet adviser, to the legislature, where it will lie in state until the weekend.
The 91-year-old patriarch died on Monday after a half-century in government, during which Singapore was transformed from a poor British colonial outpost into one of the world’s richest societies.
Photo: EPA
The government of Singaporean Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong (李顯龍), one of Lee Kuan Yew’s sons, apparently taken by surprise by the heavy early turnout, announced that Parliament House will stay open 24 hours a day until Saturday night “due to overwhelming response from members of the public.”
Applause and shouts of “We love you” and “Lee Kuan Yew” broke out as the dark brown wooden coffin, draped in the Singapore flag, emerged from the Istana housed in a tempered glass case on a gun carriage pulled by an open-topped military truck.
Earlier, in scenes that evoked Singapore’s colonial past, Lee Kuan Yew’s coffin stopped in front of the complex’s main building, where British administrators once worked, as a bagpiper from Singapore’s Gurkha Contingent — the city-state’s special guard force — played Auld Lang Syne.
It was brought down tree-lined Edinburgh Road to the Istana’s main gate where the motorcade made a slow turn in the direction of parliament as a crowd, including students in uniform with black arm bands, waited behind barricades.
Many along the route were in tears as they raised cameras and mobile phones to record the historic event. Some threw flowers on the path of the carriage.
Office workers watched from the windows of high-rise buildings along the route.
Singaporean President Tony Tan (陳慶炎) and his wife, Mary, were the first to pay their respects after Lee Kuan Yew’s closed coffin was placed in the foyer of Parliament House.
Local media said that people in Singapore began queuing after midnight on Tuesday for a chance to be among the first to pay their respects to the man popularly known by his initials “LKY.”
By yesterday afternoon, people were waiting for up to eight hours in queues that snaked around the central business district, many with umbrellas unfurled in the 33oC heat.
They came from all walks of life, from office workers and bosses to students and the elderly in wheelchairs accompanied by caregivers.
A lady surnamed Tamilselvi brought two of her granddaughters, each clutching flowers.
“Lee Kuan Yew has done so much for us,” she said. “We used to live in squatter [colonies] in Sembawang, my husband was a bus driver. Now my three sons have good jobs and nice houses. The children all go to school. What will we be without Lee Kuan Yew?”
The CIA has a message for Chinese government officials worried about their place in Chinese President Xi Jinping’s (習近平) government: Come work with us. The agency released two Mandarin-language videos on social media on Thursday inviting disgruntled officials to contact the CIA. The recruitment videos posted on YouTube and X racked up more than 5 million views combined in their first day. The outreach comes as CIA Director John Ratcliffe has vowed to boost the agency’s use of intelligence from human sources and its focus on China, which has recently targeted US officials with its own espionage operations. The videos are “aimed at
STEADFAST FRIEND: The bills encourage increased Taiwan-US engagement and address China’s distortion of UN Resolution 2758 to isolate Taiwan internationally The Presidential Office yesterday thanked the US House of Representatives for unanimously passing two Taiwan-related bills highlighting its solid support for Taiwan’s democracy and global participation, and for deepening bilateral relations. One of the bills, the Taiwan Assurance Implementation Act, requires the US Department of State to periodically review its guidelines for engagement with Taiwan, and report to the US Congress on the guidelines and plans to lift self-imposed limitations on US-Taiwan engagement. The other bill is the Taiwan International Solidarity Act, which clarifies that UN Resolution 2758 does not address the issue of the representation of Taiwan or its people in
US Indo-Pacific Commander Admiral Samuel Paparo on Friday expressed concern over the rate at which China is diversifying its military exercises, the Financial Times (FT) reported on Saturday. “The rates of change on the depth and breadth of their exercises is the one non-linear effect that I’ve seen in the last year that wakes me up at night or keeps me up at night,” Paparo was quoted by FT as saying while attending the annual Sedona Forum at the McCain Institute in Arizona. Paparo also expressed concern over the speed with which China was expanding its military. While the US
SHIFT: Taiwan’s better-than-expected first-quarter GDP and signs of weakness in the US have driven global capital back to emerging markets, the central bank head said The central bank yesterday blamed market speculation for the steep rise in the local currency, and urged exporters and financial institutions to stay calm and stop panic sell-offs to avoid hurting their own profitability. The nation’s top monetary policymaker said that it would step in, if necessary, to maintain order and stability in the foreign exchange market. The remarks came as the NT dollar yesterday closed up NT$0.919 to NT$30.145 against the US dollar in Taipei trading, after rising as high as NT$29.59 in intraday trading. The local currency has surged 5.85 percent against the greenback over the past two sessions, central
RSS