The Art of War

The Art of War — Sūnzǐ Bīngfǎ 孫子兵法, literally “Master Sūn’s Military Methods” — is a short treatise on strategy attributed to the general Sūnzǐ in the late 6th or 5th century BCE. In thirteen brief chapters it lays out a complete theory of war: how to plan, how to deceive, how to read terrain, how to manage an army’s morale, how to use spies, and above all, how to win without fighting. It has been continuously read since its composition — by Chinese generals, by Japanese samurai, by Mao Zedong, by Vietnamese commanders, and in the last fifty years by Western corporate strategists, sports coaches, and poker players. It is the most enduringly read book on strategy ever written.

We use Lionel Giles’s 1910 translation. Giles was a British sinologist at the British Museum, son of the more famous Herbert Giles. His Art of War is a serious scholarly edition: he interleaves the text with the eleven traditional Chinese commentators (Cáo Cāo, Lǐ Quán, Mèng Shì, Dù Yòu, and others), which gives the reader access to two thousand years of strategic interpretation alongside Sūnzǐ’s compressed original. The commentaries are in brackets and can be skipped on a first reading. The translation itself is precise and only slightly archaic, and remains the version most modern Western translators silently rely on.

Where to start: Chapter 1 (Laying Plans) and Chapter 3 (Attack by Stratagem — the source of “to subdue the enemy without fighting is the acme of skill”) are the two most-quoted chapters. Chapter 13 (The Use of Spies) is the most modern-feeling. The whole text is about an hour of reading.