1834 Canton Reg. 28 Oct. 170/2 The election of a temporary Chief for the Superintendence of British affairs, until the appointment of one from England, who must be a taepan or Merchant, as before and not a Government Officer.

1957 R. Mason World of Suzie Wong i. i. 9 Chinese taipans, who made the richest Europeans seem like paupers.

1972 Times 21 Oct. (Hongkong Suppl.) p. i/4 Opium can no longer be indulged in as it was with restraint by the taipans, or merchants, in old Shanghai.

1892 in K. Lentzner Dict. Slang-English Austral. 91 My typan must make fun of me, When all his crowd can see—Ah! well, perhaps they do not care For a little clerk like me.

1922 W. S. Maugham On Chinese Screen xv. 63 With the elderly, but single, taipan of an important firm, what she simply loved was a game of golf.

1977 W. Tute Cairo Sleeper i. 14 Ambassadors..mingled with other taipans of the higher civil service... Most members of the club worked in Whitehall.

1983 Sunday Tel. 10 Apr. 20/6 The Keswicks of Dumfries married into the Jardines in the middle of the last century. Four of them, including Henry, became taipan or head of the house.

1921 North-China Herald 24 Dec. 815/1 What is ‘Taipanism as seen in China’, which Mr. Ku discusses in a recent issue of the ‘Evening Standard’?.. Mr. Ku finds that ‘Taipanism’ is the spirit of respect for the sacred rights of property and vested interest.

1933 D. F. Thomson in Proc. Zool. Soc. 858 The name ‘taipan’, by which O. scutellatus is known to the aborigines of Cape York Peninsula, is an excellent vernacular name for the species.

1933 D. F. Thomson in Proc. Zool. Soc. 858 The taipan frequents the open country of the coast, as well as the inland plains and savannah forests.

1953 P. Brickhill in I. Bevan Sunburnt Country 96 The long-fanged taipan..grows eleven feet long, and nearly as thick as a man's arm... Only two men are known to have survived a taipan bite.

1966 G. Durrell Two in Bush v. 159 To have kept and bred something as rare and shy as a Taipan is a very great triumph.

1982 Daily Tel. 18 Feb. 3/1 A western taipan—one of the world's deadliest snakes—was bitten by a mouse and is fighting for its life in the Darwin Museum, Australia.