Sun Tzu

Sun Tzu — Master Sun, whose personal name was Wu — is traditionally said to have been a native of the state of Qi who served as a general under King Helü of Wu at the end of the sixth century BC, the age of Confucius. The historian Sima Qian, writing some four centuries later, tells how the king tested him by asking him to drill the palace women as soldiers; when the king's two favourite concubines, placed in command, laughed at his orders, Sun Wu had them executed, and the rest obeyed without a sound. Under his generalship, it is said, Wu defeated the powerful state of Chu and seized its capital.

Little else about his life is certain, and scholars have long debated how much of the book he wrote himself and how much was shaped by later hands in the turbulent Warring States period. But the thirteen chapters that bear his name were already in circulation by the fourth century BC: in 1972 a copy written on bamboo slips was found in a Han dynasty tomb at Yinqueshan in Shandong, close in wording to the text we read today.

The Art of War is the oldest and most influential work on strategy in the world. Its central idea is that war is a matter of life and death for the state, to be undertaken only after careful calculation, and that the supreme achievement is to subdue the enemy without fighting. It teaches knowledge of oneself and of the enemy, deception, the exploitation of terrain and of the momentum of circumstances, and the use of spies. Generals, statesmen and thinkers in China, Japan and Korea studied it for two thousand years; since its first translation into a European language in 1772 it has been read by soldiers, leaders and readers of every kind throughout the world.