About this edition

A complete edition of the surviving works of Sun Tzu (孫子) (fl. c. 6th–5th century BC), translated in a single voice with the Classical Chinese alongside.

What's here

The complete Art of War (Sunzi Bingfa, 孫子兵法) — thirteen chapters in their traditional order, from Laying Plans to The Use of Spies — translated from the Classical Chinese of the received text. Every chapter carries the source facing the English, a brief headnote, and an apparatus of glossary links and cross-references. This is a faithful from-source edition of the text itself; it does not interleave the classical commentaries (a possible future edition), and it does not pad the treatise with business advice.

From the Classical Chinese

Every translation was produced by reading the Classical Chinese text directly, not by copying or adapting any prior edition. The Classical Chinese comes from open scholarly sources.

How to use this

The Works index opens the treatise; chapters read in sequence with the Chinese parallel a toggle away. The glossary is the registry of every recurring term and name — shi, the orthodox and the extraordinary, the five factors, King Helü — with every chapter each appears in. Search spans the whole corpus, and every section has a stable number you can cite.

Citation and reuse

The translation, the headnotes, and the editorial apparatus are released under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 — share and adapt with attribution, non-commercial use only, derivatives under the same licence.

Status

1 work translated in this language.