The Art of War — who's who

Sun Wu, whose existence as a historical individual is contested by modern scholarship. The Sima Qian biography places him at the court of King Helü of Wu in the late sixth century BCE. The text's linguistic and tactical features point to a later date. The most defensible scholarly position: the work is the consolidation of a tradition, not the product of a single author. Whether Sun Wu existed or not, the figure of Master Sun — aphoristic, unsentimental, ruthlessly practical — is now inseparable from the thirteen chapters that bear his name.

King of the state of Wu from 514 to 496 BCE, the patron to whom Sun Wu is supposed to have demonstrated his methods. The concubines-as-soldiers anecdote — Sun Wu drills the king's harem, executes the two leaders for laughing, returns a perfectly disciplined unit — is the founding scene of the Sun Tzu legend. Whatever its historicity, it fixes the essential point of the book: a general must be let alone to do the work, even if the sovereign objects.

The most important reader in the two-thousand-year history of the text. Cao Cao (155–220 CE) was an active general who read the Art of War as a field manual and annotated it from that perspective. His notes form the first layer of the Eleven Commentators edition, which remains the standard Chinese text. He is also the historical figure on whom the villain of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms is based — though the historical Cao Cao was a more complex figure than the novel suggests.

The man who opened the Art of War to the English-speaking world. Giles (1875–1958) published his translation in 1910 with extensive notes drawing on the Chinese commentary tradition. The translation is in the public domain and has been continuously in print since publication. Samuel Griffith's 1963 translation, with a preface by Liddell Hart, is the standard scholarly text in English; but Giles's version remains the one most readers encounter first, and the one that carries the book's aphoristic force most directly into English prose.