Sun Tzu

Sun Tzu was an ancient Chinese military strategist and general traditionally credited as the author of The Art of War, the oldest known treatise on military strategy in the East Asian tradition. He is conventionally dated to the late Spring and Autumn period, roughly 544 to 496 BC, and is associated with the southern state of Wu under King Helü, though several modern scholars place the surviving text in the Warring States period of the fourth century BC and treat the figure as semi-legendary.

His traditional biography is set out in Sima Qian's Records of the Grand Historian, written around 100 BC. According to that account, he presented the thirteen chapters of The Art of War to King Helü, demonstrated their methods by drilling the king's harem into a disciplined company, and was appointed general. Under his command, the state of Wu defeated the larger neighboring state of Chu in the late sixth century BC and rose briefly to dominance in the lower Yangtze region.

His thirteen chapters cover terrain, intelligence, deception, the calculation of force, and the relationship between the general and the sovereign. The text argues that the highest military skill lies in subduing the enemy without battle, and that victory is the product of preparation rather than improvisation. The 1972 archaeological discovery at Yinqueshan, in Shandong, of bamboo-strip texts dating to about 140 BC confirmed that the surviving thirteen-chapter version closely matches the form known in early imperial China.

His treatise spread to Japan and Korea through Chinese-language editions and entered Europe through the 1772 French translation by the Jesuit priest Jean Joseph Marie Amiot. English translations followed in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and the work became standard reading in Western military academies and, from the 1980s onward, in business and management literature.

His name Sun Tzu — in modern pinyin Sunzi — combines the family name Sun with the honorific Zi meaning "master," the form used for respected teachers and philosophers in classical Chinese. His personal name was Sun Wu, and he is referred to by both forms in the early sources.