Tai-Pan

In January 1841, when Britain planted its flag on a mudflat at the mouth of the Pearl River estuary, a handful of trading houses began competing to control what would become Hong Kong. Clavell's novel plants itself in that founding chaos — the opium trade, the Canton merchant networks, the first land sales on the foreshore — through the figure of Dirk Struan, whose commercial cunning is matched only by his need to understand China. An 800-page act of place-making that stays rooted to the island's earliest streets.