J. R. Razoux Kühr

Jacobus Rudolph Razoux Kühr, commonly known as J. R. Razoux Kühr or Jack Razoux Kühr (born 1882 in Ternate, Dutch East Indies - died 1958 Nijmegen, Netherlands) was an Indo civil servant and businessman from the Dutch East Indies largely remembered for being one of the first editors of the popular Chinese Indonesian newspaper Sin Po.

Biography Early life Razoux Kühr was born to an Indo family in Ternate, Maluku Islands, Dutch East Indies on 17 January 1882. The family descended from J.R.'s grandfather, Cornelis Kühr, who had left Delft for a civil service post in the Indies and had married an Indo woman in Semarang named Helena Johanna du Riel Razoux. From around 1897 to 1901, he completed Hogere Burgerschool schooling at the Koning Willem III School in Batavia. During his time at the school he co-edited a weekly publication with F.B. Smits called Vox Juvenum. After that he did a round of training in what was called Indologische Instelling, which prepared students for a career in the Indies civil service. During that time he had a particular affinity for the English language and was known as an anglophile. His civil service career soon began to unravel. He was granted medical leave to return from Borneo to Batavia in the spring of 1907, but people complained that he was often seen conducting subcontracting business in Tanjung Priok. There was soon a petition to dismiss him from the civil service, since he appeared to be recruiting and dispatching Coolies for a private company in Batavia while still on leave as a government employee. Other allegations surfaced that he had engaged in dubious currency exchanges while in office in Borneo; for that, he was called to court and eventually acquitted, but was discharged from public office. He then got a job in a private "immigration office", recruiting Coolies to work on plantations in Java and Sumatra.

In 1910 his second child, Nelly, was born.

Return to Batavia and Newspaper career

In response to his legal troubles, J.R. published an English-language pamphlet in 1911: Dutch justice in Java. Are the Dutch worthy of this beautiful island with its 35,000,000 inhabitants? Startling Revelations. In the book he raged at the injustice of the Dutch legal system and hinted that the Indies might be better under English rule. The reaction of the Dutch press in the Indies to this book was quite negative, not least because it appeared to have been published in English in order to gain foreign sympathy for his case and against the Indies government.

Deciding to change careers yet again, J.R. studied Zincography under an expert named Schmidt, who himself had also been accused of using his techniques for counterfeiting banknotes. He was still not free from legal vulnerability; in 1913 he was sentenced to 2 weeks in prison under the strict press offense laws (persdelict) for something he had printed in Sin Po. He would describe one such imprisonment in 1916 in the Dutch journal De Reflector. There, he tried to set up a new newspaper using Chinese funding, named Pertimbangan (Judgement), but it did not last long.

By early 1918 however, he took up a similar post once again as editor-in-chief of Sin Po's rival paper, Perniagaan. It is unclear how long he lasted there (perhaps into late 1918 or early 1919), and he never again held a job in journalism. It is unclear what the substance of the case was.

At some point in 1919 he then relocated to Cheribon where he had been offered a position as executor to the estate of a recently deceased Chinese Officer. What came out in the trial was that Razoux Kühr's wife, fearing for her life, had fled to van der Hilst's house, and that Razoux Kühr showed up in his yard and shot him through the door. Razoux Kühr claimed that he had the rifle because was feeling suicidal over his wife's departure, and that he had only intended to talk to her when it went off by accident and killed van der Hilst. Razoux Kühr died on 13 July 1958 in Ubbergen, on the outskirts of Nijmegen, Netherlands at age 76.