38 Oxley Road
house
38 Oxley Road is an eight-bedroom two-storey bungalow located near Orchard Road, Singapore. The house was built in the late 19th century and was the residence of the first prime minister of Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew, from the 1940s until his death in 2015. The first meeting of the People's Action Party (PAP) occurred in the basement.
In 2017, it became central to a dispute in Singapore among Lee's children, Lee Hsien Loong, Lee Hsien Yang and Lee Wei Ling, over its use and demolition. Lee Kuan Yew had originally willed the house to Lee Hsien Loong, who later sold it to Lee Hsien Yang in 2015 at market price, on the condition that both of them would donate half of the value to charity.
Lee's will included a condition that his daughter Lee Wei Ling be allowed to stay there. She died on 9 October 2024, opening a range of plausible options for the house as set out by the Ministerial Committee in 2018. The options are to (i) retain the property by gazetting it as a National Monument or for conservation; (ii) retain the dining room and demolish the rest of the property; or (iii) allow the property to be demolished fully and allow for the site to be redeveloped. In 2025, the government gazetted it as a national monument.
History
Built in 1898 and commissioned by Dutch merchant Hermann Cornelius Verloop, the area in which the house was located was named after British doctor Thomas Oxley, who owned a nutmeg plantation on the location in the late 1840s.
The public source identifies “38 Oxley Road” as house. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Oxley, Road and house.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 26, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q30645623. VIAF identifies the subject as 3053169442782825340003. Authority coordinates are 1.298, 103.841. 1 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2015, 2017, 2024 and 2018.
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This entry incorporates text from “38 Oxley Road” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.