Noble House is a novel by James Clavell, published in 1981 and set in Hong Kong in 1963.
It is a massive book, well over 1000 pages, with dozens of characters and numerous intermingling plot lines. In 1988, it was adapted as a television miniseries for NBC starring Pierce Brosnan. The miniseries updates the storyline of the novel to the 1980s.
The Noble House also is a nickname of Struan's, the trading company featured prominently in most of Clavell's novels.
Plot summary Noble House is set in 1963. The tai-pan, Ian Dunross, struggles to rescue Struan's from the precarious financial position left over from his predecessor. To do this, he seeks partnership with an American millionaire, while trying to ward off his arch-rival Quillan Gornt, who seeks to destroy Struan's once and for all. Meanwhile, Chinese communists, Taiwanese nationalists, and Soviet spies illegally vie for influence in Hong Kong while the British government seeks to prevent this. And nobody, it seems, can get anything done without enlisting the aid of Hong Kong's criminal underworld. Other obstacles include water shortages, landslides, bank runs and stock market crashes.
In Noble House, Dunross finds his company the target of a hostile takeover at a time when Struan's is desperately overextended. He is also embroiled in international espionage when he finds himself in possession of secret documents desperately desired by both the KGB and MI6. The novel follows Dunross' attempts to extricate himself from all this and to save Struan's, the Noble House.
Struan and Company is based on Jardine Matheson which continues to exist to this day as an Asia based trading company. The chief character, Ian Dunross, is believed to be a composite character of two real life Jardine-Matheson tai-pans, Sir Hugh Barton and Sir Michael Herries.
Rothwell-Gornt is based on then Butterfield and Swire, now known as Swire Pacific. Quillan Gornt is based on two Swire taipans John Kidston 'Jock' Swire and William Charles Goddard Knowles.
Unlike the other Asian Saga novels, Noble House is not closely based on a specific series of events, but is more a snapshot of the 1960s in Hong Kong, and serves as a capsule history of Jardines in the 1960s,[1] against the backdrop of the impending Vietnam War, under the spectre of the recent Kim Philby defection. The story opens on Sunday, August 18, 1963, and runs for a week span of November 1963, covering the days just prior to the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Some events do mirror actual events, but not the timelines. In 1961 Jardine Matheson became a public company, with the initial offer oversubscribed by some 56 times, which is attributed in the novel to tai-pan Ian Dunross. In 1963 the Hongkong Land subsidiary of Jardine (fictionalized as Asian Properties) opened what was then the Mandarin Oriental Hotel, which has today become one of the world's leading hotels. The Dairy Farm subsidiary of Jardine moved into the supermarket sector in 1964 with the acquisition of Wellcome (fictionalized as H.K. General Stores), the big supermarket deal clearly paralleled in the book. A Jardine representative office was established in Australia in 1963, fictionalized as the next assignment of Linbar Struan. The big set-pieces â€" the fire on the boat and the landslip â€" are also closely modeled on real happenings.
A major difference between the original novel and the later miniseries adaptation is that the television version changes the setting from 1963 to the late 1980s, and updates visible technology accordingly, as well as the general atmosphere. Constantly referred to is the return of Hong Kong to China in 1997, which was (at that time) forthcoming.
