Tai-Pan: The Second Novel of the Asian Saga

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Under the command of Tyler Brock, third mate and future nemesis, Dirk Struan was whipped mercilessly. Una volta ripresomi dalla sorpresa mi sono però potuto immergere nelle atmosfere della Cina (e della nascente colonia britannica di Hong Kong) del 1800. He’s a man of action, a trader, a sailor and a bloke with a long memory: a lot of the book is taken up with a long-awaited reckoning with his nemesis, Tyler Brock.

She was secretly assigned the task of teaching "the green-eyed devil" Struan "civilised" (Chinese) ways. The Taipan is Clavell's greatest character, at least by the parameters I’ve listed, which, if you know the author, says a lot. On 21 July 1841, Dirk Struan was killed in a typhoon before he can fulfil his oath to destroy Brock. These larger than life figures are battling on a small and large scale for what is theirs, but also for what will be their childrens and their children’s children.Truth be told, I think this was better written than Shōgun even though I actually liked the 1975 book set in Japan better.

Most authors would show this by making the sailors say "Aye" a lot, here this completely changes the way that people talk, however. TAI-PAN is epic in scope, a novel whose background is the inception of Hong Kong by the British, circa 1841. It broke my heart a little bit and I cried, usually this would ruin the book for me, but this one was a masterpiece and I can't say even one bad thing about it. It is a wide ranging story about Western trade interests in China and the establishment of Hong Kong as a British colony.Business concerns of the Noble House included smuggling opium from India into China, trading spices and sugar from the Philippines, importing Chinese tea and silk into England, handling cargo papers, cargo insurance, renting of dockyard facilities and warehouse space, trade financing, and other numerous lines of business and trade.

He is unpredictable, but only seemingly so, because he gauges every situation by much more than just what is before him.Even the word “Tai-Pan” is used somewhat incorrectly, as it implies in the novel that the Tai-Pans (Definition: The head or owner of a business establishment), have great political power, maybe even more impressive power than the British Government itself, certainly something that Struan leaves an impression on from time to time, but not an emphasis which the word lends itself to. The book's got great ambience, impressive characters - villains and good guys - and a fine plot, but what really have stuck with me through all these years is the larger-than-life persona of Dirk Struan, the "Taipan", or "supreme leader. Immediately, the fact that Dirk Struan is relentlessly Scots attached itself to the image of a snake and somehow I ended up with an inability to imagine him as anything other than Sean Connery in Zardoz.

The truth is that, as likable and charming as he is, even to the reader, Struan is a very poorly written character. I was gonna go with Noble House but that one seems like it has a lot of shit having to do with finance, which I pretty much don’t understand a lot about.This is the story of his fight to establish himself and his dynasty as the undisputed masters of the Orient. Enter James Clavell, from beyond the grave, holding a copy of his 1966 tome, wordlessly gesturing that I should get that into me.