[1] 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.
[2] His father, a civil servant in Semarang and later Ternate, was named Johan George Razoux Kühr and his mother Jeanne Elisabeth Van Essel; J.R. was the sixth out of eight children.
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.
[8] 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.
[6] He moved to Singapore and started his own Coolie recruitment company, The Straits Immigration Syndicate, to send them to work in the Federated Malay States.
[2] Despite the Chinese ownership of the paper, it was common practice at that time to have a European or Indo editor who would be treated less harshly by the colonial legal system.
[2] Not unlike his book about legal injustice in the Indies, he often railed against the government in the pages of Sin Po, and gained the sympathy of many progressive young Chinese.
[6] He held the post until March 1916, when stepped down as editor, ostensibly for health reasons, suggesting publicly that he was planning to relocate to Bandung with its cooler climate.
[2] However, during his short time there he was sentenced to a 100 guilders fine or one month in prison under a press offense (Persdelict) charge for insulting the good name of Hauw Tek Kong, then director of Sin Po.
[21] 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.
[2] Their departure may have been related to the West New Guinea dispute between Indonesia and the Netherlands, since Tan's name was on a published list of evacuees being repatriated as a result of Indonesian measures against Dutch interests in the country.