Tai-Pan: The Second Novel of the Asian Saga

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The Noble House was on the brink of financial collapse and about to be destroyed by rival Tyler Brock. There were a ton of others worth mentioning but I also enjoyed Culum, Quance, Mary, Gordon and their stories. But like many other Chinese characters in the book, she reverts at times from perfect sounding English to becoming the stereotypical Asian woman, speaking cute, quaint, but gibbering English (and I won’t repeat the sexual innuendo associated with Asian women trying to speak English, but I assume you get the idea! Un libro lleno de aventura por la vida de Dirk Struan, de principio a fin te engancha y te hace reaccionar de diversas formas. 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.

g. “spiritually“), opened his eyes, and certainly not to the degree of Blackthorne’s love affair with Japan. This is an epic tale, with Shakespearean romance, typhoons, love and malaria, incest, discord between fathers and sons, the building of a city of trade, lust, complicated characters with tangled relationships, and an exploration of the power of possession. This works for the most part because, according to Clavell, foreigners were pretty much strictly forbidden from going anywhere other than those two places.

Una volta ripresomi dalla sorpresa mi sono però potuto immergere nelle atmosfere della Cina (e della nascente colonia britannica di Hong Kong) del 1800. I usually will get kinda bored with most romances but there was a lot of that stuff in this one and I somehow got into it, which was surprising. I really loved the words used and how the language used is an older and some words I need to look up. He is, of course, completely over the top, and it’s this that provides a lot of the friction in the work: he’s a Scottish giant who has Plans and Schemes, and who twists representatives of the Crown around his little finger. Compared to Shogun, which had a fair number of characters of about equal importance and each with their own plotlines that tied together fairly well, in Tai-Pan there's - as you can see - a far more clear single central protagonist, and a great many more plotlines, great and small, involving him: even the ones he didn't know or care about all come down to him in the end.

This book raises the issues of Imperial trade, the duplicitousness of Opium smuggling, the strained heirachical positioning of both Chinese and Imperial British society and touches on many of the taboos and prejudices of the British community. Its jus an endless narrative with very little to no description of events or actions, let alone much (Zero) historical fiction context.Anyone who presented a half-coin to the Tai-pan of the Noble House must be granted whatever he asked, whether legal or illegal. There were so many great characters especially Dirk and his Mei Mei, they were so well suited,yin and yang.