Tai-Pan

Tai-Pan Review

Tai-Pan is the second novel in James Clavell’s Asian Saga — though it was published second, it is set chronologically earlier than Shogun, in 1841, at the founding of the British colony of Hong Kong. It is Clavell’s most energetically plotted novel, a book that combines the commercial and political intrigue of a business thriller with the historical ambition of a colonial epic.

Dirk Struan is the Tai-Pan — the supreme leader — of the Noble House, a powerful British trading company based in the Pearl River Delta. When the British seize the island that will become Hong Kong after the First Opium War, Struan recognizes the opportunity: a deep-water harbor that could become the greatest trading post in Asia. The novel follows his efforts to establish the colony, build his commercial empire, and defend both against the enemies — British rivals, Chinese merchants, Triads, and the shadowy Portuguese pirate Gorth — who want to destroy what he is building.

Clavell’s great subject is the collision and partial interpenetration of Eastern and Western cultures, and Tai-Pan gives him the founding moment of one of that collision’s most important sites. Struan is not a simple imperialist — he has a Chinese mistress whom he loves and respects, he speaks Cantonese, and he has a deeper understanding of Chinese culture than almost any of his contemporaries. But he is also an agent of commercial imperialism who profits from the opium trade, and Clavell doesn’t paper over this contradiction.

The commercial and political maneuvering — between trading houses, between nationalities, between the overt economy and the criminal networks underneath it — is rendered with the detail of someone who has done the research and finds the subject genuinely interesting. Tai-Pan is the novel that established the template for Clavell’s saga at its most ambitious.