Word: taipan
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...Hong Kong it is known as the princely hong, or trading house, and its leader is the taipan, the big boss. Throughout most of its 156-year history, Jardine Matheson & Co. has been the foremost trader in the colony, and as readers of Novelist James Clavell know, it has been run not so much by a series of executives as by a dynasty of merchant-rulers. Now the succession has taken its strangest turn. Instead of drawing from the small Scottish knot of the founders' families, Jardine Matheson has announced that Brian Powers, 38, a former New York investment banker...
...Death set U.S. and European box office records in 1973, Shaw Brothers has kept a keen eye out for Western fans. Cleopatra Jones and the Casino of Gold (a Shaw Brothers-Warner Brothers coproduction) was a hit in the U.S. This year Shaw Brothers bought the rights to Taipan from MGM and budgeted $12 million to film James Clavell's bestseller...
Hutchison was built in taipan (big boss) style by Sir Douglas Clague, a 59-year-old Rhodesia-born Englishman. Under his aegis the company boosted profits from $3 million in 1969 to $27 million in 1973, mainly by buying up other companies at a headlong pace. To pay for them, it floated no fewer than ten stock issues in three years, ballooning the number of shares outstanding from 13 million in 1971 to 269 million in May of this year. Between mid-1973 and last December, however, a crash on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange and declining confidence in Hutchison...
...minor miracle. Beneath a giant Moreton Bay fig tree in Port Moresby (pop. 7,000), the Post's termite-honeycombed headquarters has been flooded eight times during monsoons. Twice the composing room has been invaded by serpents-a ten-foot python, a rare and venomous taipan-which were pelted to death by ingots of type metal. One night a horde of winged ants, attracted by the lights, swarmed in to lay a living veneer on the Linotype machines, jam the works with their bodies; a mechanic imported from Australia had to be shipped home with a nervous breakdown...
...Cordell Hull last week promised the Government of Free China that there would be no more extraterritoriality in China, from Shanghai came the perfect epitaph for Shanghai's plutocracy. It was not the work of a taipan but of brilliant, crotchety British Lawyer Ranald McDonald, an ornament of Shanghai's bar and bars. At the Council's April meeting he had shrilled a speech that might have been drafted either by Mr. Pickwick or an early Shanghai missionary...