The Comprehensive Lee Kuan Yew Anthology

I scraped the National Archives of Singapore for all of Lee Kuan Yew's writings, speeches, and rallies, and put them into a 12,000 page PDF. Download it here.

Zane Austen

Jun 26, 2022

The PDF is at the bottom. Enjoy!

Why LKY?

Lee Kuan Yew is highly controversial, for example:

Strong advocate for hanging drug traffickers: “If we could kill them 100 times, we would.”
Rejecting American media norms by suing journalists, and winning.
Governing and speaking on cultural and racial differences.

But also highly successful:

Jewel. Photo by Nathaniel Yeo / Unsplash.

And responsible for inspiring China’s dramatic reform under Deng Xiaoping, indirectly lifting 800 million people out of poverty.

Obviously, Singapore is a successful country. But it’s had to reinvent itself many times: from basic manufacturing, to skilled manufacturing, to a financial and technology hub, and now advanced manufacturing.

How did he defeat the Communists, deal with the involuntary ejection of Singapore from Malaysia, and defuse the fanged criticisms of Western journalists along the way? We can read his books, but only by reading the primary sources can we transport ourselves back in time.

The Code

I scraped the data with Mathematica from the National Archives of Singapore and collated them with Ghostscript.

In a little more detail: browsing the National Archives of Singapore website, I found an interesting PDF of an LKY speech. Looking a little further, I noticed I could search and filter by Lee Kuan Yew’s works. And a little further, by inspecting the JS attached to the click handler of the “next” button, I realized the archives were navigable with a URL parameter. From there, it was simple to construct the page URLs, import all hyperlinks within them, filter for the actual PDF, and download them (with some interval to not get silently rate-limited).

Here’s the code: