Art Of War Pdf

The Ar t of W ar
Sun Tzu
The Oldest Military Treatise in the World
Translated from the Chinese,
with an Introduction and Critical Notes
by

Lionel Giles, M.A.

Assistant
Department of Oriental Printed Books
And Manuscripts
British Museum
1910

The Art of War by Sun Tzu

To my brother
Captain Valentine Giles, R.G.
in the hope that
a work 2400 years old
may yet contain lessonsworth consideration
by the soldier of today
this translation
is affectionately dedicated.

A Puppet Press Classic

The Art of War by Sun Tzu

Introduction ------------------------------------------------------------- 5
Sun Wu and His Book -------------------------------------------------5
The Text of Sun Tzu -------------------------------------------------- 17
The Commentators---------------------------------------------------- 20
Appreciations of Sun Tzu --------------------------------------------24
Apologies for War ----------------------------------------------------25
Bibliography ----------------------------------------------------------29
Footnotes -------------------------------------------------------------- 31
The Art ofWar---------------------------------------------------------35
I. Laying Plans ------------------------------------------------------35
II. Waging War ------------------------------------------------------41
III. Attack by Strategem ----------------------------------------------46
IV. Tactical Disposiitons ---------------------------------------------53
V. Energy ------------------------------------------------------------- 58VI. Weak Points and Strong ------------------------------------------65
VII. Maneuvering ----------------------------------------------------74
VIII. Variations in Tactics -------------------------------------------85
IX. The Army on the March -----------------------------------------92
X. Terrain ----------------------------------------------------------- 106
XI. The Nine Situations-------------------------------------------- 115
XII. The Attack by Fire ---------------------------------------------- 143
XIII. The Use of Spies ----------------------------------------------150

The Art of War by Sun Tzu

Sun Tzu's

The Art of War was virtually unknown in
Europe until 1782, when a French Jesuit
priest living in China, Joseph Amiot, acquired a copy and translated it intoFrench. It was not a good translation because, Dr. Giles wrote, "[I]t
contains a great deal that Sun Tzu did not write, and very little indeed of
what he did."
Capt. E. F. Calthrop, R.F.A, published the first English translation in
1905 in Tokyo. Dr. Giles said this translation was, "excessively bad " a nd
! It is not merely a question of downright blunders, from which none
can hope to bewholly exempt. Omissions were frequent; hard passages
were willfully distorted or slurred over. Such offenses are less pardonable.
They would not be tolerated in any edition of a Latin or Greek classic, and
a similar standard of honesty ought to be insisted upon in translations
from Chinese."
In 1908, a new edition of Captain Calthrop's translation was
published in London. It was an improvement "o missions filled up and
numerous mistakes corrected " b ut new errors were created in the
process.
Dr. Giles wrote about his own translation: "It was not undertaken
out of any inflated estimate of my own powers; but I could not help feeling
that Sun Tzu deserved a better fate than had befallen him, and I knew
that, at any rate, I could hardly fail to improve on the work of mypredecessors."
Dr. Giles was a leading Sinologist and an assistant in the
Department of Oriental Printed Books and Manuscripts in the British
Museum.

The Art of War by Sun Tzu

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I n t r od uc t i o n
Sun Wu and His Book
Ssu-ma Ch`ien gives the following biography of Sun Tzu: [1]:
Sun Tzu Wu was a native of the Ch`i State. His Art of War brought
him to the...