Taib’s career was unparalleled, distinguished and also controversial

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TUN Abdul Taib Mahmud did not lose his patrician good looks nor his signature "smiling tiger" grin even as he began to falter in his role as governor of Sarawak.

But the former chief minister, once the most powerful and feared man in Sarawak, was a shadow of his previous self by the time his good friend Tan Sri Dr George Chan visited him in hospital a few days before he passed away on Wednesday morning at age 87.