Today Singapore is not as tightly wound as before. Its citizens are more vocal, and the government more responsive to their grievances—economic rather than political: the high cost of living, the wide wealth gap and the inflow of migrants. But such burdens of office are no longer for Lee. No-nonsense to the end, he didn’t overthink his legacy. “I am not given to making sense out of life, or coming up with some grand narrative of it,” he wrote in 2013. “I have done what I had wanted to, to the best of my ability. I am satisfied.” So passes the man from Singapore, who became a man of his time.