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SCMP Reporter

Tai-Pan James Clavell 
 (Hodder)  
 James Clavell's   epic elicits a  love-hate response from most Hongkongers. The fast-paced  best-selling historical  novel,  set during the colonisation of  Hong Kong in 1841, tells the story  of the rivalry between tai-pan  (supreme leader) Dirk Straun and his enemy Tyler Brock. 
Red-haired Straun runs trading company The Noble House, in between sparring with his Chinese mistress, May-May, manipulating the British Superintendent of Trade, William Longstaff, to carry out his plans, and scheming with Cantonese criminal baron Jin-Qua. 
On the other side, one-eyed Brock of Brock and Sons attempts to thwart Straun at every opportunity while trading as much opium, tea and bullion as he can. At the outset, they are quick to draw their knives, spit and to curse the 'God-rotting flyspeck of an island' but it takes 600 pages until their showdown.  
During the course of the almost-700 page epic, the colony is created, warred over and almost lost.  No Hong Kong clich? is  left out, from the feisty mistress to the star-crossed lovers from rival houses,  pirates with honour to interracial secret love affairs. 
 Clavell spent a year researching in Hong Kong before writing Tai-Pan. He was quick to refute any connection to real characters.  But Tai-Pan is widely regarded as being loosely based on the rise of  trading house Jardine Matheson, and  Straun on William Jardine.
Early reviewers applauded  the book's plot and description  of Hong Kong, but many were critical of the stereotypical character portrayals, which sometimes demean  the Chinese characters  who are characterised as conniving, vicious and concerned with money and their own 'face' above all else. Overall though, readers are  drawn to  the rollicking plot and emotive language. 
As  New York Times reviewer Orville Prescott  said:  'Tai-Pan frequently is crude. It is grossly exaggerated much of the time. But seldom does a novel appear so stuffed with imaginative invention, so packed with melodramatic action, so gaudy and flamboyant with blood and treachery and conspiracy, sex and murder.' 
Time labeled it 'a belly-gutting, God-rotting typhoon of a book'.  
Clavell, who wrote Tai-Pan in  the years between writing the screenplays for cinema classics The Great Escape and To Sir With Love, said he was a 'storyteller' and did not have literary aspirations. He told The Washington Post: 'The people I write about are mostly doers. They have to do something to extract themselves from this [dangerous] situation, and what you have, then, are heroics and a good read.' So it remains after reprints across multiple languages and reported sales of more than 8 million copies. 



BOOK (1966)