The Art of War (annotated)

📖 The Scoop

The Art of War is an ancient Chinese military treatise attributed to Sun Tzu, a high-ranking military general, strategist and tactician, and kindred to the Realpolitik of his time, termed in China as Legalism. The text is composed of 13 chapters, each of which is devoted to one aspect of warfare. It is commonly thought of as a definitive work on military strategy and tactics. It has been the most famous and influential of China's Seven Military Classics, and "for the last two thousand years it remained the most important military treatise in Asia, where even the common people knew it by name." It has had an influence on Eastern and Western military thinking, business tactics, legal strategy and beyond. The book was first translated and published into French in 1772 (re-published in 1782) by the French Jesuit Jean Joseph Marie Amiot and a partial translation into English was attempted by British officer Everard Ferguson Calthrop in 1905 under the title The Book of War. The first annotated English translation was completed and published by Lionel Giles in 1910. Numerous military and political leaders such as the Chinese communist revolutionary Mao Zedong, Japanese daimyo Takeda Shingen, and American military general Norman Schwarzkopf, Jr. have drawn inspiration from the book. The Art of War is traditionally attributed to a military general from the late 6th century BC known as Master Sun (Sunzi or Sun Tzu), though its earliest parts probably date to at least 100 years later. Sima Qian's 1st century BC work Records of the Grand Historian (Shiji), the first of China's 24 dynastic histories, records an early Chinese tradition stating that a text on military matters was written by a "Sun Wu" from the State of Qi, and that this text had been read and studied by King Helü of Wu (514-495 BC). This text was traditionally identified with the received Master Sun's Art of War. The conventional view, which is still widely held in China, was that Sun Wu was a military theorist from the end of the Spring and Autumn period (776-471 BC) who fled his home state of Qi to the southeastern kingdom of Wu, where he is said to have impressed the king with his ability to train even dainty palace ladies in warfare and to have made Wu's armies powerful enough to challenge their western rivals in the state of Chu. The prominent strategist, poet, and warlord Cao Cao in the early 3rd century AD authored the earliest known commentary to the Art of War. Cao's preface makes clear that he edited the text and removed certain passages, but the extent of his changes were unclear historically. The Art of War appears throughout the bibliographical catalogs of the Chinese dynastic histories, but listings of its divisions and size varied widely. In the early 20th century, the Chinese writer and reformer Liang Qichao, theorized that the text was actually written in the 4th century BC by Sunzi's purported descendant Sun Bin, as a number of historical sources mention a military treatise he wrote. Around the 12th century, some scholars began to doubt the historical existence of Sun Tzu, primarily on the grounds that Sun Tzu is not mentioned in the historical classic The Commentary of Zuo, which mentions most of the notable figures from the Spring and Autumn period. The name "Sun Wu" does not appear in any text prior to the Records of the Grand Historian, and has been suspected to be a made-up descriptive cognomen meaning "the fugitive warrior": the surname "Sun" is glossed as the related term "fugitive", while "Wu" is the ancient Chinese virtue of "martial, valiant", which corresponds to Sun Tzu's role as the hero's doppelganger in the story of Wu Zixu. Unlike Sun Wu, Sun Bin appears to have been an actual person who was a genuine authority on military matters, and may have been the inspiration for the creation of the historical figure Sun Tzu through a form of euhemerism.

Genre: History / Military / Strategy (fancy, right?)