Other excised elements include the visit of a delegation of British MPs, the role of Author Avatar Peter Marlowe, Dunross' dealings with the Japanese Toda family and anything to do with Dunross' own family. Despite being six hours, the 1988 Noble House miniseries has a lot of things missing compared to the book, most notably the Sevrin plot and everything to do with it (including Jacques' status as The Mole, Cross' double agent status and Suslev's character).The most notable excision is that Struan's meeting with Jin-Qua completely excises the plot point of the four half-coins so crucial to the novels. The 1986 film version of Tai-Pan removes a lot of plot elements, including Zergeyev's role as an agent of Russian expansion, the Catholic Church putting information into Struan's hands to stop him, Longstaff's entire role, the malaria plague that almost destroys Hong Kong, the British governments's attempts to shut the Colony down and May-May's plot to have Gorth assassinated (Struan simply directly kills him when he comes to confront him about Culum and Tess' elopement).

Noble House itself condenses many real-life events from the 60s and early 70s - the 1965 bank run caused by the Canton Trust bankruptcy, the Jumbo floating restaurant fire of 1971, the Kotewall Road landslide of 1972 - into a time period of about a week.

Also there was a strategy game based on Tai-Pan for many platforms, including ZX Spectrum. Shogun, Tai-Pan, King Rat and Noble House have been adapted for film and television (with the Shogun miniseries/film starring Toshiro Mifune being the best known adaptation), and Shogun was also adapted as an Infocom computer game and a Broadway musical. The novels don't form a single continuous story, but are linked together by recurring characters, and their descendants, and a theme of examining interactions between Asian peoples and Westerners. The Asian Saga is a series of novels by James Clavell, set in Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore and Iran over a period from 1600 to 1979.

Shogun james clavell book