Sun Tzu

Sun Tzu, "Master Sun", is the name traditionally given to the author of The Art of War, the most famous work of military strategy ever written in China and probably in the world. Tradition makes him a general named Sun Wu who served the king of the southern state of Wu at the end of the sixth century BCE. Whether such a man existed, and how much of the book he could have written, are open questions: most modern scholars think the text took shape a century or more later, during the Warring States period. Whoever wrote it, its short, sharp principles, that the best victory is won without fighting, that war rests on deception, and that one must know both the enemy and oneself, have been studied by soldiers, statesmen and business leaders for more than two thousand years.

The earliest account of Sun Tzu's life is a brief biography in the Records of the Grand Historian by Sima Qian, written around 100 BCE under the Han dynasty, roughly four centuries after the events it describes. According to Sima Qian, Sun Wu came from the state of Qi, in today's Shandong, and offered his book of thirteen chapters to King Helü of Wu, who reigned from about 514 to 496 BCE. The traditional dates for his life, about 544 to 496 BCE, rest on this story rather than on any independent record.

The best-known anecdote tells how the king, to test him, asked him to drill the palace women. Sun Wu divided 180 of them into two companies and put the king's two favourite concubines in command. When the women laughed at his orders, he declared that once instructions are clear, disobedience is the fault of the officers, and had the two commanders beheaded despite the king's protests. After that the women obeyed perfectly. Impressed, if unhappy, the king made him a general, and Sima Qian credits him with helping Wu defeat the powerful state of Chu, capturing its capital after the battle of Boju in 506 BCE, and with intimidating Qi and Jin to the north.

Already in the twelfth century, under the Song dynasty, the scholar Ye Shi noticed that the Zuo Zhuan, the much earlier and more detailed chronicle of the period, describes the wars of Wu and the battle of Boju without mentioning Sun Wu at all. Modern historians add that the text reflects conditions of the Warring States period (about 475 to 221 BCE) rather than the late Spring and Autumn period: it describes large conscript armies led by professional generals, long campaigns, and weapons such as the crossbow, which became common later. Some scholars think the figure of Sun Wu was invented, or built up from stories about other men, to give the book an ancient author.

A further complication was Sun Bin, a strategist of the fourth century BCE described by Sima Qian as Sun Wu's descendant, who was also called Master Sun. For centuries some scholars suspected the two were the same person. In 1972 construction workers at Yinqueshan, near Linyi in Shandong, uncovered Han dynasty tombs containing bamboo slips buried in the second century BCE. They included a large part of The Art of War, close to the received text, and a separate, previously lost work by Sun Bin, showing that two different books existed. The find confirmed the text's antiquity, but not the existence of Sun Wu. The most common view today is that The Art of War was compiled in the fifth or fourth century BCE, perhaps over time, within a tradition associated with the name Sun.

The book is short, about six thousand Chinese characters in thirteen chapters, written in compressed, aphoristic sentences. It begins by stating that war is a matter of life and death for the state and must be studied carefully, and it is strikingly aware of the cost of fighting. Long campaigns exhaust a country's treasury and people; no state, it says, has ever benefited from prolonged war. The highest skill is therefore to defeat an enemy's plans and alliances, or to win without battle at all. Fighting and capturing cities are worse options.

When war cannot be avoided, success depends on calculation, intelligence and deception. All warfare, the text says, is based on deception: appear weak when strong, far when near. A general who knows the enemy and knows himself need not fear the outcome of a hundred battles. The book discusses terrain, the handling of troops, attacks with fire, and, in its last chapter, the use of spies, which it regards as essential. A key idea is shi, often translated as strategic advantage or momentum: the general should create a situation in which his forces gain overwhelming force from their position, like water rushing downhill or a boulder rolling down a mountain. Armies should be flexible like water, which has no fixed shape and takes the form of its container.

The text also gives the commander wide independence from the ruler once a campaign begins, and treats discipline, rewards and punishments as tools for control. Its emphasis on adapting to circumstances and on effortless effectiveness has led some readers to connect it with Daoist ideas found in Laozi, though the relationship is debated.

The Art of War became the most respected of a group of military texts. Cao Cao, the warlord of the late Han period, wrote the oldest surviving commentary on it, and in 1080 the Song emperor Shenzong made it the first of the Seven Military Classics, used for official military examinations. It reached Japan in the eighth century, where it was studied by samurai commanders, and Korea and Vietnam. In the twentieth century Mao Zedong quoted it in his writings on guerrilla warfare during the Chinese Civil War and the war against Japan.

The French Jesuit missionary Jean Joseph Marie Amiot published the first European translation in 1772. The first English translations appeared in 1905 and 1910, the second by the sinologist Lionel Giles, which remains widely read. During the Cold War Western military thinkers took a fresh interest in it, partly to understand the communist revolutions in Asia, and its ideas were cited in American military doctrine after the Vietnam War. Since the 1980s it has also become a best-seller in business and management, sports coaching and self-help, often in loose paraphrase.

Historians of Chinese philosophy place The Art of War within the intellectual ferment of the late Zhou dynasty, when rival schools, from the followers of Confucius to the Legalists, competed to advise rulers in a time of constant war. Its picture of conflict as a matter of knowledge, cost and advantage rather than glory has kept it relevant in China and far beyond.