لي كوان يو

Lee Kuan Yew cried on television the day his country was born.

He thought Singapore couldn't survive: tiny, no natural resources, its water piped from Malaysia.

Within his lifetime, it grew richer per person than Britain, which once ruled it. How?

At 18, under Japanese occupation, he slipped away from a group of men being taken to be shot. It taught him, he said, the meaning of power.

After the war, he studied law at Cambridge with Kwa Geok Choo. He called her the better student.

Back home, he won a strike for the postal workers, and 100 unions made him their lawyer.

With the unions behind him, he co-founded a party, and at 35 he was prime minister.

He took Singapore into Malaysia. Two years later, after race riots, Malaysia's parliament voted Singapore out. That was the day he cried.

Now survival meant jobs, so he and his team brought in foreign factories.

An American chip plant was up and running in 50 days.

He wanted every family to own its home. Otherwise, he wrote, a soldier would feel he was fighting to protect the property of the rich.

Nine in ten households came to own theirs.

He paid his ministers well, to keep them honest, he said. One of them took bribes. He went to jail.

They even made the island bigger: sand became land.

In 1990, he stepped down after 31 years. He had ruled hard: rivals were locked up without trial, and critics were sued.

"If nobody is afraid of me," he said, "I'm meaningless."

When his wife, Choo, could no longer speak, he read her poems every night.

"What have I got?" he said. "A successful Singapore. What have I given up? My life."

When he died, at 91, more than 400,000 people queued to say goodbye.

He had feared Singapore couldn't survive. It outlived him.