Tai-Pan

Dirk Struan runs the Struan trading house in Hong Kong in the nineteenth century, when British merchants are pushing into China and opium drives the money. He holds the title of Tai-Pan, head of the most powerful firm in the new port, and he intends to keep it.

His chief enemy is Tyler Brock, who once sailed with him and now leads the rival Brock firm. Their feud goes back many years and rests on old betrayals. In the cutthroat trade in opium and tea, each man tries to outdo the other as the settlement grows.

The story spans more than one generation. Dirk's son Culum comes of age within the family business, and the book follows what the Struan name will stand for after its patriarch. The colonial setting is shown without softening, including the brutal side of the drug trade and the tangled politics of the British presence in China.

This is a long historical novel with a large cast, heavy on period detail and on business and personal warfare. It is the second book in James Clavell's Asian Saga, and it reads as an epic of ambition, rivalry and betrayal, with friendship tangled in among the hostility.