Ice Vendor Amasses Rp10 Trillion Fortune: Here's the Source of His Wealth
Jakarta, CNBC Indonesia - The difficulty of owning a refrigerator in the past proved to be a blessing for ice sellers. This included Taspirin, who is estimated to have had wealth of Rp10 trillion.
In the 1900s, or the colonial era, he was known as one of the richest people thanks to ice. At that time, ice was hard to obtain because there were no refrigerators or cooling machines, making ice highly valuable and always in demand.
Taspirin himself, as reported by Harian de Locomotief (25 July 1902), owned an ice factory in Ungaran, Semarang. His factories expanded again in 1910 in Petelan, Semarang, becoming the largest in the area.
Not only in the ice business, Taspirin also owned a slaughterhouse and traded in animal hides. From there also came his accumulated wealth.
Every month, he earned 30-40 thousand guilders. From his increasingly widespread ice factories, Taspirin also owned many houses and land in Semarang.
In records from De Nieuwe Vorstenlanden (8 September 1919), Taspirin’s assets upon his death reached 45 million guilders.
The price of one litre of rice at that time was only 6 cents, meaning he could buy 750 million litres of rice with his wealth. If linked to the price at that time when one litre of rice was around Rp13 thousand, his wealth could reach Rp9.7 trillion or nearly Rp10 trillion.
Other Ice Kings
Besides Taspirin, there was another ice king named Kwa Wan Hong, also from Semarang. It was from his hands that the first ice industry in Indonesia emerged.
Kwa established the Hoo Hien ice factory in 1895. Historian Denys Lombard’s records in Nusa Jawa Silang Budaya (1999) state that the ice he produced came from a chemical reaction, namely a mixture of salt and ammonia that turned water into ice.
In the end, that ice factory changed the habits of Indonesians in consuming ice, as revealed by the newspaper De Nieuwe Vorstenlanden (17 July 1901). Ice was no longer expensive and hard to obtain, but became more affordable and easily found.
The amount of his wealth is unknown, but Kwa owned much land, houses, and ice factories in various areas.
Another successful ice seller from that era was Robert Chevalier from Magelang. He sold ice under the name NV. Magelangsche Ijs en Mineralwater Fabriek since 1920 and had a total of three ice factories before going bankrupt during the Japanese occupation in 1942.