SINGAPORE — Thousands of Singaporeans braved a torrential downpour on Sunday for a final farewell to the country’s founding prime minister, Lee Kuan Yew, whose funeral drew a long list of leaders and dignitaries from across the globe.
The funeral procession wound through rain-soaked streets to the National University of Singapore, where a service was held ahead of a private cremation. Mr. Lee’s coffin was taken on a route that was meant to be symbolic of his accomplishments, passing by the Corrupt Practices Investigation Bureau — a tribute to his reputation for incorruptibility — and two of the country’s oldest government-backed housing developments in a nation with one of the world’s highest rates of homeownership.
As the coffin passed, crowds shouted, “Lee Kuan Yew! We love you!” To allow more people to see as the procession passed, some spectators in the front line closed their umbrellas, despite the pouring rain.
“This has been a dark week for Singapore,” Lee Hsien Loong, Singapore’s prime minister and Mr. Lee’s eldest son, said in a nationally televised eulogy. “That light that has guided us all these years has been extinguished.”
The prime minister remembered his father, who died last Monday at 91, as “a straight talker” who “never shied away from hard truths.”
He gave his eulogy in a mix of English, Malay and Mandarin Chinese, three of the official languages of the city-state, which gained full self-government from the British in 1959 and which the elder Mr. Lee governed from then until 1990, when he stepped down.
During that long rule, he transformed Singapore into one of the wealthiest and least corrupt nations in Asia. His hugely successful “Singapore model” was sometimes criticized as soft authoritarianism that included centralized power, clean government and economic liberalism along with the suppression of political opposition and strict limits on free speech.
A number of speakers Sunday talked about Mr. Lee’s hard edges and described him as a demanding leader who showed courage in making tough political decisions.
Goh Chok Tong, Mr. Lee’s successor as prime minister, said Mr. Lee “drove his people hard,” and Sidek Bin Saniff, a member of Parliament, quoted Mr. Lee as saying: “If you want to be popular all the time, you will misgovern.”
Former United States President Bill Clinton was in the audience, as was the former American secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, who has called Mr. Lee “a close personal friend.” Also in attendance were Prime Minister Tony Abbott of Australia; the British first secretary of state, William Hague; Prime Minister Hun Sen of Cambodia; Vice President Li Yuanchao of China; Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India; Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan and President Park Geun-hye of South Korea.
The number of prominent guests at the funeral was outsized for a nation as small as Singapore, a reflection of Mr. Lee’s role as an adviser to world leaders and a statesman.
“Despite being small, Singapore’s voice is heard, and we enjoy far more influence on the world stage than we have any reason to expect,” the prime minister said in his eulogy. He also talked about his father’s continual thirst for knowledge, saying, for instance, that Mr. Lee was so committed to learning Mandarin that he was still taking lessons just before he fell gravely ill.
His son also quoted Mr. Lee’s once saying that “Even from my sickbed, even if you are going to lower me into the grave and I feel something is going wrong, I will get up.”
There has been no official announcement on what will happen to Mr. Lee’s ashes.
The funeral capped a week of public grieving that included a large turnout at Parliament, where his coffin was displayed for four days and where many people waited up to 10 hours to pay their respects. In a country of 5.5 million residents, more than 450,000 people viewed Mr. Lee’s coffin, and another 1.2 million visited centers set up across the city-state for people to express their condolences.
“I may not agree with all his policies, but I do need to salute this one man,” said Priscilla Neo, 42, who lined up with her husband and two children for four and a half hours Friday morning to view the coffin. Ms. Neo described the former prime minister as someone “who truly breathed, ate, slept, and thought about Singapore and its citizens.”
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