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Cover of The Art of War

The Art of War

Sun Tzu

First published 500 BCE · Mindset, Wellness & Ancient Wisdom · 1 hr 13 min of audio · 13 chapters

A short manual on winning without fighting, written for a Chinese general around the fifth century BC. Its chapters are aphorisms: a few lines each, built for memory.

Things worth knowing

  • The last chapter sorts spies into five classes, among them the doomed spy, who is fed staged deceptions to carry back to the enemy.
  • The treatise reached the West first in French, in a Jesuit missionary's translation published in 1772.

Checked against source, source.

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Every chapter has the recording and the same chapter as text. Open both if you like: the text is the words you are hearing.

  1. 1 Laying Plans 4 min
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  2. 2 Waging War 4 min
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  3. 3 Attack by Stratagem 4 min
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  4. 4 Tactical Dispositions 3 min
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  5. 5 Energy 4 min
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  6. 6 Weak Points and Strong 6 min
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  7. 7 Manoeuvring 6 min
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  8. 8 Variation of Tactics 3 min
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  9. 9 The Army on the March 8 min
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  10. 10 Terrain 6 min
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  11. 11 The Nine Situations 12 min
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  12. 12 The Attack by Fire 3 min
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  13. 13 The Use of Spies 5 min
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Where this comes from

Translated by Lionel Giles.

US public domain: translation published 1910. RESTRICTED elsewhere. The translator, not the author, sets the term.

Cover image: generated for this edition.

Narration: text-to-speech.

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