Art of War,The

“Like Thucydides, [Sun Tzu] has a reputation today at least as great as it was well over two millennia ago … Given the peculiarly personal acumen and insight that inform Sun Tzu’s brief, sometimes enigmatic, but always practical Art of War … we are surely reading the words of an acutely intelligent military man with a subtle, original mind and a wealth of experience all his own.” —from the Introduction by Peter Harris

SUN TZU was a Chinese general, military strategist, and philosopher who lived in China in the 6th century BC. Sun Tzu is traditionally credited as the author of The Art of War, a widely influential work of military strategy that has affected both Western and Eastern philosophy. Sun Tzu is revered in China as a legendary historical figure. His birth name was Sun Wu; the name Sun Tzu by which he is best known is an honorific that means “Master Sun.”

PETER HARRIS graduated from Oxford in classical Chinese and has a Ph.D. in Asian history from Monash. He lived and worked for many years in different parts of Asia including China, where he was representative of the Ford Foundation and a visiting professor at Nanjing University. He is now a Senior Fellow in the China Research Centre at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. Volumes he edited for Everyman’s Library include The Travels of Marco Polo, The Art of War, Zen Poems, Three Hundred Tang Poems, and Hanshan- Cold Mountain Poems.