Ecco, ambientazione, personaggi e finale mi hanno fatto amare questo libro malgrado la storia fosse un po' debole. 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, rollicking, cutthroat competitive maneuverings grabbed me by the collar and yanked me into this Southwest Pacific tale, hanging me on the yardarm so that I could marvel at the entirety of the colorful, frantic pageant unfolding before my young and excited eyes. Mi ha stupito il cambio completo (di epoca, di località, di personaggi) rispetto all'altro libro, pensavo la serie asiatica sarebbe proseguita con più continuità. 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 just try to protect mysel’ and mine as best I know how and to choose the time of my dying, that’s all.

However, he does suffer from being made to look like the less intelligent, alcoholic and abusive version of Struan. 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. It conjures up some excellent historical imagery and introduces many of the most important historical developments of the era. Before joining Goodreads, I had already read ‘Shogun’, so you, my friendly reader, do not have the luxury of a review of that as comparison, but I believe that what I say about ‘Tai-Pan’, set in Hong Kong, can easily be said of it’s predecessor.

There is a Hong Kong hidden somewhere between two formable and foreign entities rivaling each other.

The narrative vividly explores the clash of Western and Eastern cultures, intricate business strategies, and the complex relationships among the diverse characters. Suspans, razboi, dragoste, pirati, actiune, familie, intorsaturi de situatie, are de toate fara doar si poate.

This works for the most part because, according to Clavell, foreigners were pretty much strictly forbidden from going anywhere other than those two places. But despite these aspects (and a few others that I just don't want to get into right now - such as the pidgeon English conversations - ugh) Tai-Pan is entertaining. In fact, to take Clavell off the hook , there are only a few great authors who can pull these things off without a hitch, so I sympathize. For a few lines, May-May sounds proficient, adding to her vocabulary Struan’s Scottish nuances, like “You dina…” (‘Tai-Pan’ 194), or “Na so loud! All the cunning and strategies involved in maintaining the largest trading company of the time, all the bitterness and rivalries experienced, all of it was astonishing to the senses.If Queen Victoria was the biggest drug dealer in the history of the world, then Dirk Struan, the 'Tai-pan' is her Main Dealer in Hong Kong. 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. But it is mostly a shadowed figure sandwiched between an Anglo-centric storyline, no matter how much Dirk Struan asserts his admiration and assimilation to some, and in the pages of the book, very little, Chinese culture. He is rather harsh on Struan, long before he understands the circumstances that have shaped his father.