Sun Tzu

Sun Wu — honored by the title Sun Tzu, “Master Sun” — is remembered as a general and strategist of the state of Qi, in what is now Shandong, China, in the turbulence of the Spring and Autumn period around the fifth century BCE. Tradition places his life about 544 to 496 BCE, though the man himself stands at the edge of history: many scholars regard him as semi-legendary, and the treatise that bears his name took its lasting form in the Warring States era that followed.

That treatise is The Art of War — thirteen spare chapters that turned warfare from brute contest into disciplined thought. Its counsel — that the supreme skill is to subdue an enemy without fighting, that all warfare is founded on deception, that one must know both the enemy and oneself — reads as much as philosophy as tactics, weaving the calm of the Tao into the arts of conflict.

By tradition he served King Helü of Wu and led its armies to victory over the far larger state of Chu at the Battle of Boju in 506 BCE. Whether the campaigns are his or his legend’s, the book outlived every battle it ever described.

For two and a half thousand years it has been read by soldiers and statesmen, from the courts of imperial China to the strategists of the modern age, and carried far beyond war into diplomacy and endeavor of every kind. Honored among the Great Ones of every civilization; kept here so the memory is never lost.