Sun Tzu

No battle can be securely tied to Sun Tzu, so this page links none. Sima Qian credits him with a share in Wu’s wars against the larger state of Chu, which ended with the capture of the Chu capital, Ying, in 506 BC. Victor Mair notes that there is no solid evidence from before the Han dynasty that Sun Wu existed at all.²

What was Sun Tzu famous for?

Sun Tzu is famous as the reputed author of The Art of War (Sunzi bingfa), a short treatise in thirteen chapters. It argues that the best victory is won without a battle, that warfare rests on deception, and that a general who knows both the enemy and himself need not fear defeat.³

Supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy's resistance without fighting.⁴

• Know yourself and the enemy. Know both and a hundred battles hold no danger; know only yourself and every victory is matched by a defeat; know neither and every battle is a danger.⁵
• All warfare is deception. When able to attack, seem unable; when near, make the enemy believe you are far away, and when far away, that you are near.⁶
• Win without fighting. A hundred victories in a hundred battles is not the height of skill; subduing the enemy’s army without a battle is.⁷
• Speed over attrition. No country has ever benefited from a prolonged war, so a campaign should be quick.⁸
• The five factors. The Way (Giles’s “Moral Law”), Heaven, Earth, the general and method decide the outcome, and a general should weigh them before fighting.⁹
• Foreknowledge through spies. Knowledge of the enemy cannot be obtained from spirits; it comes only from people who know his situation.¹⁰

Sun Tzu’s most famous quotes

These lines are given in Lionel Giles’s 1910 English translation; Victor Mair’s study and Columbia University’s selection render the same passages in their own words.¹¹

Did Sun Tzu really exist?

Possibly, but it cannot be proved. Sima Qian’s Shiji, the only biography, makes him Sun Wu, a native of Qi who served King Helü of Wu (reigned 514 to 496 BC). Yet the Zuo zhuan, the main chronicle of the period, never mentions him, and Columbia University’s Asia for Educators finds no firm evidence that he existed.¹⁸

Sima Qian’s story is vivid. King Helü, who says he has read Sun Wu’s thirteen chapters, lets him drill 180 palace women. When they laugh at his orders, Sun Wu has the king’s two favorite concubines, who led the two companies, executed; after that the women obey perfectly. Helü makes him a general, and Wu defeats Chu and enters its capital, Ying.¹⁹

Doubts are old. The Song-dynasty scholars Ye Shi and Chen Zhensun pointed out that the Zuo zhuan never mentions Sun Wu. Lionel Giles, weighing the evidence in his 1910 translation, concluded that the author, whoever he was, was probably not a man of great standing in his own day.²⁰

The sinologist Victor Mair goes further. He calls the biography essentially fictional, notes that Sima Qian shortened a story already told at greater length in a bamboo manuscript, and argues that Sun Wu is probably a backward projection of Sun Bin, a Qi strategist of the 4th century BC whom Sima Qian makes Sun Wu’s descendant.²¹

Archaeology added evidence in 1972. Western Han tombs at Yinqueshan, near Linyi in Shandong, yielded thousands of bamboo slips, among them a copy of The Art of War and the long-lost military treatise of Sun Bin. The find showed that these were two different books, against the theory, held by some scholars, that Sun Tzu and Sun Bin were one man.²²

It did not settle who wrote The Art of War. China Daily, reporting a 2025 exhibition of the slips at the Shandong Museum, says the find ended doubts about Sun Tzu’s existence; Mair reads the same manuscripts as part of a large body of “Master Sun” lore from which the book was compiled.²³

Did Sun Tzu fight in any battles?

No battle can be securely credited to him. In the Shiji, Sun Wu helps the minister Wu Zixu train the army of Wu, and Wu then defeats Chu and takes its capital, Ying, in 506 BC. Giles points out that the Shiji never says that Sun Wu commanded at Ying, or that he even went there.²⁴

Giles adds that Wu Zixu and Bo Pi both took part in that expedition and that its success owed much to Fu Gai, Helü’s younger brother, which leaves little room for another leading general. Mair notes that there is no solid evidence from before the Han for Sun Wu’s part in the wars of the 6th century BC.²⁵

How did Sun Tzu die?

No source records how or when Sun Tzu died. Sima Qian’s account ends with Wu’s victory over Chu and its pressure on the northern states of Qi and Jin, and tells nothing later about him. Giles judged that Sun Wu probably did not outlive his patron, King Helü, who died in 496 BC.²⁶

When was The Art of War written?

No one knows exactly. Tradition places it before Sun Wu met King Helü, around 500 BC. Columbia University’s Asia for Educators dates its compilation to the second half of the 4th century BC, and Victor Mair sees it as a late Warring States summary of earlier military experience. Copies were buried in Western Han tombs.²⁷

Giles, reading the text for clues, noticed that it never mentions Chu, Wu’s main enemy until 506 BC, while it treats the state of Yue as a rival. He concluded that the thirteen chapters were written after 506 BC, when Yue had become Wu’s chief adversary. Ye Shi had already argued, Mair notes, that the warfare the book describes belongs to the Warring States period.²⁸

By the Han dynasty the book was well known. Sima Qian wrote that Sun Tzu’s thirteen chapters and Wu Qi’s Art of War were the two books people commonly cited on military matters, and Mair finds its reputation firmly established by the beginning of the 1st century BC.²⁹

How many chapters does The Art of War have?

Thirteen. In Sima Qian’s biography King Helü already tells Sun Wu that he has read his thirteen chapters, and a Han-era wooden slip cited by Mair has “Master Sun” speak of “the thirteen chapters.” Each chapter is short. In Giles’s translation they run from planning a war, through maneuver and terrain, to fire attacks and spies:³⁰

1. Laying Plans
2. Waging War
3. Attack by Stratagem
4. Tactical Dispositions
5. Energy
6. Weak Points and Strong
7. Maneuvering
8. Variation of Tactics
9. The Army on the March
10. Terrain
11. The Nine Situations
12. The Attack by Fire
13. The Use of Spies

The Art of War through history

1. Around 500 BCTraditional lifetime of Sun Wu, placed by Sima Qian at the court of King Helü of Wu (reigned 514 to 496 BC).³¹
2. 506 BCWu takes the Chu capital, Ying; tradition gives Sun Wu a share in the campaign.³²
3. 4th century BCThe text is compiled, according to Columbia’s Asia for Educators; Mair places its final form in the late Warring States period.³³
4. Western HanCopies of The Art of War and of Sun Bin’s treatise are buried in the Yinqueshan tombs, found in 1972.³⁴
5. 1772The Jesuit Jean Joseph Marie Amiot publishes the first translation into a European language, in French.³⁵
6. 1905E. F. Calthrop’s English translation appears in Tokyo under the title Sonshi.³⁶
7. 1910Lionel Giles publishes his English translation, the source of most English quotations.³⁷
8. 1936Mao Zedong quotes “know the enemy and know yourself” in Problems of Strategy in China’s Revolutionary War.³⁸

How did The Art of War reach Japan, Mao and the West?

By different roads. In Japan, the warlord Takeda Shingen carried a banner quoting one of its passages. Europe met it in 1772 through Amiot’s French version, and the first English translation appeared in Tokyo in 1905. In China, Mao Zedong quoted it in 1936. Today it is read in military schools and corporate boardrooms.³⁹

Shingen’s banner, known by the short form Fu-Rin-Ka-Zan (wind, forest, fire, mountain), carries four phrases from the seventh chapter, which Giles renders as “Let your rapidity be that of the wind, your compactness that of the forest. In raiding and plundering be like fire, in immovability like a mountain.” Shingen sits among the greatest commanders of feudal Japan.⁴⁰

In Problems of Strategy in China’s Revolutionary War (December 1936), Mao cited “Sun Wu Tzu” on knowing the enemy and knowing yourself, and on avoiding an enemy at full strength and striking when he tires and withdraws. Mair notes that Mao called the first maxim a “scientific truth.” Ideas such as the case against wars of attrition have entries in our glossary of military tactics and terms.⁴¹

Amiot, a French Jesuit who lived in China from 1750 until his death in 1793, published his version in Paris in 1772; Mair notes that it mixed commentary and Amiot’s own ideas into the text, and dismisses as a fabrication the story that Napoleon studied it. Captain E. F. Calthrop’s English version was issued in Tokyo under the Japanese title Sonshi, and Giles judged it so full of errors and omissions that he made his own.⁴²

Columbia University’s Asia for Educators notes that the book is read in military schools and corporate boardrooms around the world, and Harvard Library calls it a commonly cited treatise in academia, the military and business management.⁴³

Where Sun Tzu sits among the great commanders

Sun Tzu left no battle we can follow step by step, as we can with Hannibal at Cannae or Julius Caesar at Alesia. What survives is a book of principles rather than a record of campaigns. Set him beside the men who fought the battles in our guide to the greatest military commanders in history, and see which of them you most resemble in our Which Commander Are You quiz.

More head-to-head comparisons: Sun Tzu vs Clausewitz.

How does The Art of War compare with the other classic of strategy? See Sun Tzu vs Clausewitz.