He starts out as a bratty, arrogant, idealistic kid and while he definitely loses most of his brattyness he never really becomes half the man his father is. It has all the passion of ambition, love, and danger one can expect from a story with an “exotic“ setting and an adventure behind it. Around this time, there was an ever growing xenophobia in China that could have been more fully examined, but never reaches that point, only touched upon.

And then fate and chance work their inevitable twists and unforeseen disasters into the mix, and we are plunged into a complex, interrelated web of schemes, ploys, conspiracies, violence, lusts, and desperation, as the House of Struan strives to recover from happenstance misfortune without selling the British portion of Hong Kong's soul, whilst the House of Brock, under the glint-eyed, heavy-handed leadership of Brock and the brutal energies of his hulking son, Gorth, do everything in their power to ensure that Struan and Company flounder and sink, thus enabling Brock to assume to title of Tai-Pan that he holds by right should be his. I also loved his clever, funny, ultra-sweetheart mistress May-May and loved hating cruelly violent psycho nemesis Brock. 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. In 1834, free trade reform advocates succeeded in ending the monopoly of the British East India Company under the Charter Act of 1833. It might not be something you’ll come back to, but the time taken to read will be well, if guiltily, spent.Their rocky and often abusive relationship as seamen initiated an intense amount of competitive tension. Not the crappiest crap I've ever seen, but really - if an author has to repeat the same "foreign-flavor" word 4 times on one page, he clearly doesn't have the most innovative of spirits.

Tai-Pan is a title - the leader, strong man, big man on campus – of the richest trading company on Hong Kong.But despite these aspects (and a few others that I just don't want to get into right now - such as the pidgeon English conversations - ugh) Tai-Pan is entertaining. Several times throughout the book, he shows signs of having matured and being his father's son, hatching his own schemes and being in charge of his own destiny, however a few pages later he is the same insecure, naive child he was before. Struan faces political machinations, opium wars, and personal vendettas while establishing the Noble House trading company.

Years passed and I tried Gai-jin - I only finished that because I constantly hoped that even turn of the page would somehow bring about the book's miraculous redemption. I don't often fall victim to employing modern-day lingo, but it offers a great way to describe Dirk Struan in a single word, and that word is Chad. Having inhaled Shōgun (and the excellently terrible miniseries adaptation) on a trip through Japan, I was well prepared for the way this novel would go. He knows how merciless life can be and his primary goal every day is to protect what is his and the people he cares about. In fact, to take Clavell off the hook , there are only a few great authors who can pull these things off without a hitch, so I sympathize.

Una volta ripresomi dalla sorpresa mi sono però potuto immergere nelle atmosfere della Cina (e della nascente colonia britannica di Hong Kong) del 1800. This is by far the biggest criticism I have with the book - there is no drama, no tension, nothing that would make me want to get to the end of the story to see whether the hero can overcome it. 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. Another point in the novel that brings this home and actually puts ‘Shogun’ ahead of ’Tai-Pan’ is the fact that scenes in ’Tai-Pan’ are almost entirely set up in the British settlements around Hong Kong.

Intensely readable and exciting' Sunday TelegraphSet in the turbulent days of the founding of Hong Kong in the 1840s, Tai-Pan is the story of Dirk Struan, the ruler - the Tai-Pan - of the most powerful trading company in the Far East. While the sudden death of such a likable character certainly had an impact on me, it is without doubt one of the laziest endings I've ever witnessed in a book. Although the island is largely uninhabited and the terrain unfriendly, it has a large natural harbour that both the British government and various trading companies believe will be useful for the import of merchandise to be traded in mainland China, a highly lucrative market. He is the originator of the "coin debt" to which Dirk Struan and future tai-pans of the Noble House must swear to uphold (revealed as well in Noble House).The arch that should have happened over the course of the book is instead rushed out in what can't be more than three hundred words.