Este despre a-ti pastra cuvantul indiferent de situatie, viclenie pentru a negocia astfel incat sa fii mereu in avantaj, curaj si antrenarea obiceiului de a vedea imaginea mai mare, de ansamblu. Clavell is best known for his epic Asian Saga series of novels and their televised adaptations, along with such films as The Great Escape, The Fly and To Sir, with Love. 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. However, he does suffer from being made to look like the less intelligent, alcoholic and abusive version of Struan. I never felt like I couldn't put the book down or had to read to the end of a chapter because half the time I didn't even know what I was reading about.

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.We are never really given an approximation as to how long she had been with Struan, but it seems to be a significant time. Clavell originally wanted the novel to span from the establishment of Hong Kong until the present day but when writing it decided to end the novel on the death of the first tai pan.

In 1834, free trade reform advocates succeeded in ending the monopoly of the British East India Company under the Charter Act of 1833. As the pace kept speeding up and the end of the book was getting closer and closer I stopped hoping for some interesting finale and accepted that I would likely get some terrible twist of fate or act of god in the end that would make the finale seem less wholesome and try to make up for the fact that the protagonist faced no challenge throughout the entire story.The New York Times said the book was not as notable as King Rat but was "almost an archetype of pure story telling.

The first thing to know about this book is that it’s not an immersive look into 19th century China in the manner of something like Shogun.

It conjures up some excellent historical imagery and introduces many of the most important historical developments of the era. 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. I hate it when women are characterized as high-strung purebred horses - Clavell does this explicitly in this book in at least one scene, and implies it in others. 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.

There aren't really good guys and bad guys (except, you know, Imperialism), just competing interests and agendas. As has been pointed out by others there is no grand battle to fight in this story, no Uber Villain to be brought down, no single event at all.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. as she attempts to appease the Chinese god’s to help their listing boat to safety, by pretending to offer the god gold, but “cheating” in the end, and promising Struan that the god would never know that she tricked the god out of her end of the bargain by not dropping some gold into the sea (195).