Confucius

Confucius — in Chinese Kong Qiu, honoured as Kongzi, "Master Kong" — was born in 551 BC in the small state of Lu, in what is now Shandong province in eastern China. His family belonged to the lower aristocracy and had fallen on hard times; his father died when he was a small child, and he grew up poor. As a young man he held minor posts, keeping granaries and tending livestock, and in his own words "set his heart on learning" at fifteen.

China in his time was divided among rival states nominally loyal to the declining house of Zhou. Confucius looked back to the founders of the Zhou dynasty, and above all to the Duke of Zhou, as models of government by virtue and ritual rather than by force. He gathered disciples from every rank of society — tradition puts their number at three thousand — and taught them the classics of poetry, history and ritual, and the cultivation of character. For a time he held office in Lu, and then, around the age of fifty-five, set out on long years of travel from state to state in search of a ruler who would put his teaching into practice. None did. He returned to Lu in old age and died there in 479 BC.

He wrote no book of his own. His sayings and conversations were collected by his disciples and their followers into the Lunyu, the Analects, which became, with the commentaries of later scholars, the foundation of education in China for more than two thousand years, and spread through Korea, Japan and Vietnam. From the second century BC Confucian learning was the basis of the imperial examinations; temples to Confucius stood in every county of the empire.

His teaching centres on ren, the humaneness that makes a person fully human; on li, the rites and forms through which human relations are given order and grace; on filial piety, learning, and the figure of the junzi, the gentleman, whose authority rests on virtue rather than birth. Few thinkers in history have shaped the lives of so many people for so long.