Ebook: The dao of the military: Liu An's art of war

Master Sun’s The Art of War, the best-known ancient text on adversarial strategy, is by no means China’s only treatise on military affairs. A single chapter in the Huainanzi, an important compendium of philosophy and political theory written in the second century B.C.E., synthesizes the entire corpus of military literature inherited from the Chinese classical era. Drawing on all major, existing military writings, as well as other lost sources, it assesses tactics and strategy, logistics, organization, and political economy, as well as cosmology and the fundamental morality of warfare.

This powerful work set out to become the last word on military matters, subsuming and therefore replacing all preceding literature. Yet scholars have largely ignored the text and its singular perspective. Written under the sponsorship of Liu An, king of Huainan, the Huainanzi’s “military methods” elevates the preservation of peace as the...