Category:Johan George Mulder

Johan George Mulder, a.k.a. Jan G. Mulder and J.G. Mulder (1869-1922) was a Dutch businessman and photographer.

• Book: John Kleinen (intr.): J.G. Mulder. Zijstraten van de geschiedenis - De wereld rond 1900 in stereofoto’s. Uitgeverij De Verbeelding, 2006. ISBN 90 74159 95 8
• See also: IIAS Newsletter 2007
• Website: Auspostalhistory SPEIDEL & CO., GERMAN KEROSENE & MERCANTILE CO., FRENCH INDOCHINA

"[...] The Speidel Company was first thought to produce kerosene lamps in Germany (see later), and after an exhaustive search by a businessman correspondent IN Germany this could not be confirmed. The company began operating in Indochina (the future Vietnam) in the 1880’s and Jan George Mulder, a Dutch salesman from Haarlem, The Netherlands, was an employee of the Company. He travelled to Asia at the age of 35 and in 1904 he started to sell lamp oil (kerosene) for the Asiatic Petroleum Company (APC) in the remote harbour town of Haiphong. APC was the marketing company for two emergant giants in the oil business, Shell Transport & Trading Co. and the Royal Dutch Company. From 1904-1908, Mulder spent his spare hours photographing stereoscopic images on glass plates of his work environment, scenes of his private life, as well as of his travels. One photo of his private life shows J.G. Mulder at home with the chamber servant who was also employed for fanning the room with a punkah, a large frame covered with cloth (Figure 4).

Mulder had his office along the busy Rue Paul Bert, in a building Speidel & Co shared with a branch of the British Chartered Bank. He soon moved to a private house at the corner of the Canal Bonnal and the Rue de Cherbourg. One of his photographs showed the storage area located at the entrance of the harbour which contained lamp oil tins and large oil tanks inscribed with the company names, Speidel and APC (Figure 5).

Mulder lived in a quiet area of Haiphong in the Hotel de Marseille, near Speidel & Co.’s office. Haiphong’s community of non-French Europeans was small. At the turn of the century, the city counted just a 100 ‘Aliens’. Mulder’s colleagues were mainly Germans working for Speidel & Co. He was a bachelor, and a Vietnamese housekeeper ran his household. Mulder returned to Europe in 1908 (so he probably saw the contents of this cover’s letter which arrived in August 1907), and he married. He had earned a fortune at Speidel’s firm which enabled him to emigrate to the United States in 1910, and he started a farming community in Virginia. [...]"