I wanted so much to like this more than I did (I loved Shōgun). But I had a lot of emotional problems with this book:1. Aside from May-May, none of the women are written as characters of any worth (even Tess didn't live up to what I was expecting).2. The annexation has always bothered me. The British had no business being there in the first place (they had no business being anywhere where they occupied, annexed, colonized, imperialized, etc., and neither did any of the other countries that did t...

Fantastic, by God. It's joss that I was able to read this again and love it just as much as the first time. This is the book that sparked my obsession with trading houses. A fabulous historical fiction for anyone with interest in Hong Kong.

A highly compelling book with a whopper of an ending that's somehow simultaneously epic and subtle. I don't feel this book reached the heights of Shogun in terms of thematic content or characterization, but O marveled at the political and interpersonal intrigues with a large cast of characters, all with very interesting motivations. This was a very well plotted book that rarely sagged, and took a story about an era and event that frankly I'm not really that interested in reading about highly enj...

A masterful work from an extremely talented storyteller.Truth be told, I think this was better written than Shōgun even though I actually liked the 1975 book set in Japan better. Tai-Pan is more streamlined, more focused on its subject and narrative.Tai-Pan was Clavell’s second book, first published in 1966, and is coincidentally also the second chronological book in his Asian saga of books. (Shogun was his third published book but first in chronological order). It was an immediate best-seller a...

***MOVIE ADDENDUM ADDED SEPT 13th, 2014***”’Joss’ was a Chinese word that meant Luck and Fate and God and the devil combined.” Hong Kong was just a cluster of fishing villages when the English traders arrived in 1841. The port quickly proved a safe haven to ships even impervious to Typhoons.Dirk Lochlin Struan is a Scotsman who has spent a good part of his adult life in the orient amassing a fleet of clipper ships and a great fortune. He is called the Tai-Pan. He has made his own joss by bein...

I've read this before & really liked it, but it is even better as an audio book. Incredible, really. John Lee has great accents & intonations & really makes the book come alive.Clavell is most famous for Shōgun, the first of his Asian series, which was made into a mini series starring Richard Chamberlain. It was excellent & takes place about 2.5 centuries earlier in Japan. Tai-Pan is about the founding of Hong Kong about 1840 & takes place over a period of 6 months. It was ma...

One absolutely brilliant book, but I didn't expect this ending, something similar yes, but the way it ended - NO!! 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.There were so many great characters especially Dirk and his Mei Mei, they were so well suited,yin and yang. Some books and characters fade with time, but I'm not sure I will ever forget those two. This is a book I will be rer...

Big, chewy, lip smacking, gut busting fiction. How appropriate that I should have finished it on Thanksgiving - a day given to gastronomical excess.Whew. This is not a historical tome. It is a fictionalized account of the first year of the British colony of Hong Kong (1841). The characters are all loosely based on actual people - as are their trading companies. That is what Clavell did in his novels and it's important that one understand that.Clavell was also an ardent supporter of Free Trade, a...

Having begun with King Rat, I proceeded to work my way through most of James Clavell's Asian Saga before running out of steam - and interest - with the overly-long and rather lacklustre Whirlwind; and of them all, Tai-Pan was my favorite. Shogun was fantastic, mysterious, complex, cruel, violent, erotic, dressed with elaborate manners and rituals, alien thought patterns, ironclad honor, smelly Europeans, the whole works - but it didn't have the Struans versus the Brocks, which crackling, bloody,...

Wanted to get a nice concise history of Hong Kong, ended up with James Clavell's Tai Pan. I read Shogun when I was 14, and remember liking it enough to read through the 1000+ pages (and that sex scene with the anal beads? Blew my 14 year old mind. And my DAD had read the book. Yikes.) Maybe my taste is different now but Tai Pan is pretty dissapointing. Lots of cool historical details, but they feel a bit shoe-horned in, and the main character is, well, basically perfect. At least in James Clavel...