Born in 1909 to Lim Loh alias Lim Chee Geee, a wealthy businessman who owned a biscuit and brick manufacturing business in Singapore, Lim was the 11th child but the first son. At the age of 16, Lim came to Singapore in 1917 to study in the Raffles Institution of Singapore under the British colonial government, and later went on to further his studies in the University of Hong Kong.In 1930, Lim married Gan Choo Neo, a Nonya woman in the Lim Clan association hall of Singapore. They had eight children, one of whom died in infancy.Initially raised as a Taoist, Lim converted to Christianity after receiving strong European influence.

At the time of the Second Sino-Japanese war, Lim, a loyal Chinese patriot, participated in fund-raising on Japanese resistant forces and boycott activities of Japanese goods organized by the Nanyang Federation.On February 11, just before the fall of Singapore to the Japanese, Lim left his family for the last time to the care of his wife and fled from Singapore to Sumatra with other Chinese community leaders, before making his way to India, where he recruited and trained hundreds of secret agents through intensive missions from the military and intelligence point of view in India and China. Around this time, together with Captain John Davis, they set up the Sino-British guerrilla group Force 136 in mid-1942. One of his best friends and students, Tan Chong Tee, participated actively in anti-Japanese activities until his capture on 26 March 1944

Soon after everything had been organized in China and India, Lim Bo Seng sent the first batch of Force 136 agents to Malaya in May 1943. The operation was codenamed Gustavus. Their objective was to set up an espionage network to gather military intelligence about the Japanese. This would allow the British Army to carefully plan the invasion of Malaya and Singapore, codenamed Operation Zipper. One of the Chinese provision shops in Ipoh, Jian Yik Jan, was an Allied espionage base. According to historical sources, messages were smuggled in empty tubes of toothpaste, salted fish and even in their own diaries. Bo Seng arrived in Malaya in November 1943. To avoid identification by the Japanese, Lim passed himself through checkpoints as a businessman, using the alias Tan Choon Lim.The operation went wrong before the agents could gather any military intelligence. An unknown communist guerrilla was captured by the Japanese in January 1944, who revealed the existence of an Allied spy network operating on Pangkor Island. They soon began a full-scale counter-espionage operation on the island. By late March 1944, more than 200 Japanese soldiers were swarming all over Pangkor.

Tan Chong Tee advised Lim Bo Seng to leave Ipoh in view of the circumstances, but he refused to flee until he had heard from , another agent who had travelled to Singapore in search of funds.On March 24 , the Kempeitai arrested a fisherman, , at Teluk Murrek on the Perak coast. Chua was merely a fisherman working on Pangkor when a member of Force 136, , approached him, requesting to use his boat to benefit their spy network. He told the secret police everything, from the spy network to members of Force 136 without even being interrogated. The Japanese then used Chua as a bait to lure Li. Under torture, Li confirmed Chua's story.

Then the Japanese were hoping to make Li work for them, treating him relatively well. Held at the Kempeitai headquarters in Ipoh, Li was still determined to escape. On the pretext of taking a bath, he jumped from the second floor bathroom. He then got into a taxi, telling the driver that he was an anti-Japanese guerrilla making his escape. The driver responded positively, and immediately proceeded to Bidor. But the escape failed to delay the Japanese. Within a few hours of Li's escape, the Japanese had raided the network's headquarters, capturing Tan Chong Tee, and later Lim Bo Seng. The entire network was destroyed by March 31, 1944.

Officers and were blissfully unaware that their spies had fallen like dominoes until the escapee Li Han Kwang staggered into their camp on March 29. The destruction of the network was a huge blow to the British. It wrecked their plans to develop spy networks in Malaya and hopes of an early invasion by military force. It was not re-established until early 1945.Broome concluded that Chua Koon Eng was the man to blame. He noted that Chua was released quickly by the Japanese and that his business in Pangkor thrived under Japanese rule. He was privy to the entire network of agents and he knew where the hideouts were located. He also noted that Chua had not been screened when he was roped in to help with the rendezvous arrangements. He mysteriously disappeared when Allied forces returned to Malaya.

On March 26, 1944, Tan Chong Tee was captured by the Japanese. Upon hearing this news, Lim initially wanted to escape immediately, but was convinced to wait till the next morning. This proved to be a fatal mistake, as the Japanese had blocked all the roads out of Gopeng immediately after Tan's capture. Marshall [citation needed], the man who captured Lim, suspected that Tan was trying to tell Lim to escape. Lim was caught and taken to the Kempeitai headquarters for interrogation. Strong as he was, Lim battled through all sorts of physical and mental torture and duress daily but he never uttered a single word about pain and refused to give up information about Force 136. Instead, he protested against the ill-treatment of his comrades in the prison. However, Lim soon became ill with dysentery and was bedridden by the end of May 1944.As his condition worsened, Lim was taken to a small terraced prison-house a little away from the main prison building. In the last days of his life, Lim was not given food, water or medicine, although he received some porridge, but his condition was so bad that he could not even swallow the porridge. Many of his fellow prisoners cried to the Japanese soldiers to give him some medicine. The Japanese, however, ignored their pleas.Lim eventually died in the early hours of June 29, 1944. He was later buried behind the Batu Gajah prison compound in an unmarked spot.However, after the death of Lim Bo Seng, many of the Japanese authorities softened their stance a little. The prisoners, for a period of time, were given better food. Simple medical treatment and daily exercises in the prison compound were provided for the prisoners.After the surrender of Japan, Lim's wife, Choo Neo, was informed of her husband's death by the priest of St Andrew's School. Choo Neo later traveled with her eldest son to bring her husband's remains home. A funeral ceremony was held on January 13, 1946 in front of City Hall to mourn the death of Lim.The coffin containing his remains was transported to a hill in MacRitchie Reservoir for burial with full military honours. He was posthumously awarded the rank of Major-General by the Chinese Nationalist Government.

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