Dirk Lochlin Struan is the fictional main character of James Clavell's 1966 novel Tai-Pan. The title comes from a Cantonese term that Clavell loosely translates as "supreme leader", and Struan is the taipan or head of his own trading company in China, Struan's. In Clavell's literary universe, moreover, Struan is presented as the Tai-Pan, and his company as the Noble House, the greatest private trading company in nineteenth-century Asia.