Tai-Pan: The Second Novel of the Asian Saga

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Schemes are enacted, others are discovered, moves and counter-moves, friends are enemies and enemies are friends, and sailing ships race across the South China Sea.

Un libro lleno de aventura por la vida de Dirk Struan, de principio a fin te engancha y te hace reaccionar de diversas formas. 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. While I found Clavell's use of language in Shogun fascinating, here it felt nothing but off-putting to me. 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.Most of the Chinese dialog in this novel is dominated by May-May, semi-main characters, like her and Gordon Chen.

Clavell was also an ardent supporter of Free Trade, an avowed opponent of Communism and Fascism and an admirer of certain aspects of both Asian and Western culture. It is the early 19th century, when European traders and adventurers first began to penetrate the forbidding Chinese mainland. Extension of their barbaric and selfish work in America, Africa, India and NOW China, TaiPan is a closer look at these Barbarians way of thinking! Most authors would show this by making the sailors say "Aye" a lot, here this completely changes the way that people talk, however. Its jus an endless narrative with very little to no description of events or actions, let alone much (Zero) historical fiction context.

In 1834, free trade reform advocates succeeded in ending the monopoly of the British East India Company under the Charter Act of 1833. Unfortunately, not everyone is cool with this whole thing, chiefly his rival of decades Tyler Brock of Brock and Sons.

But it doesn’t get more, because it doesn’t significantly deliver on its promise on the cover to be part of an ASIAN SAGA; one in which two cultures encounter one another, and the political and cultural consequences that follow.

Clavell seems to not have been able to decide whether he wants Brock to be simply a rival of Struan's or an evil fantasy antagonist. We are never really given an approximation as to how long she had been with Struan, but it seems to be a significant time. Jin-qua – Chinese tea and opium trader, lends Dirk Struan "4 million" (approximately 1 million pounds sterling in silver bullion) to get out of debt to Tyler Brock. I just try to protect mysel’ and mine as best I know how and to choose the time of my dying, that’s all. Clavell sets his novel just after the 1842 Opium War which won Britain the right to deal smack to the Chinese, and got them the island and surrounding bay of Hong Kong.

I did, and I’m glad because if there’s anything that can distract from this year, it’s a doorstopper-sized tome about Bastards Being Bastards played out against the backdrop of 1840s China (including the nascent outpost of Hong Kong) and the oceans of the world. In what is literally the last page, however, one of Struan's oldest friends says a few words to Culum, which make him decide that he is his father's son and is going to lead the Noble House as a man. Much has also been written about Clavell's fondness of blending those aspects that he believed were the best of both worlds to make a new culture. Some examples include a malaria outbreak in Hong Kong, a Chinese attack on some of the traders' factories, someone close to the Tai-pan falling ill and an attempt on the Taipan's heir's life. From the very opening, with a virgin Hong Kong awaiting its annexation by the British, recently victorious in the First Opium War, and the first taste of the rough-and-ready, brutal-on-a-dime sensibilities of the coarse and cunning Brock, the somewhat more subdued and disciplined Yanks of Cooper-Tillman, and then the magnificent entrance of the swashbuckling-but-practical hero himself, Dirk fucking Struan, the Tai-Pan of the commercial empires, and his half-brother Robb - who so dearly wished to be like Dirk, but just wasn't - all of these heads of Western trading houses and the differing-in-details, but similar-in-spirit dreams of the almost endless potential for Hong Kong - serving as a leverage point for the commercial crowbar they wished to wield to crack open the unimaginable riches of the mysterious and vast Orient - everything is laid out to give the reader a taste of the excitement, the possibility that lay heavy in the humid air.Struan's only surviving son, Culum, shows potential in the beginning of the book for an arch that never happens. Set in 1840s China (Canton), Macao and most importantly, the brand-new English colony of Hong Kong (which Dirk negotiated away from the Emperor through the oh-so-pliable governor), the story is set around Dirk Stuan, a larger than life English “China trader” pitted against Brock, his dark and brutish arch enemy, in a nonstop race to be the best, make the most and outsmart all the rest as tai-pans of The Noble House and the Second Noble House. Although the novel features many characters, it is Dirk Struan and Tyler Brock, former shipmates and the owners of two massive (fictional) trading companies who are the main focal points of the story. The descriptions of China, the Chinese people and their interactions with the invading westerners (English and Portuguese both) are very intriguing for those that are interested in learning about everything Chinese.