'War is the way of deception.' Thirteen short chapters on strategy, read in the original Chinese.
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The most famous book on strategy ever written, and one of the shortest: thirteen chapters, about six thousand characters. It covers planning, supplies, terrain, spies and winning without a battle, in lines so compressed they have carried centuries of commentary. We are pressing the first chapter now. It can't be read here yet; your support is what gets it done.
Tradition gives it to Sun Wu, a general who served the king of Wu around 500 BC. Most historians now think the text took shape later, in the Warring States period of the fifth and fourth centuries BC. In 1972 archaeologists opened a Han-dynasty tomb at Yinqueshan in Shandong and found it written on bamboo slips, more than two thousand years old.
The historian Sima Qian tells how Sun Wu proved himself by drilling 180 palace women as soldiers. When they giggled at his orders he had the king's two favourite concubines, their captains, beheaded, and after that they obeyed. The book itself is cooler than the legend. Read character by character, the famous lines turn out shorter than their translations: 'know them, know yourself' is four characters.
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