The Art of War

Books
Asian Studies
de Bary, William Theodore, Wing-tsit Chan, and Burton Watson, eds. Sources of Chinese Tradition.
Vol. 1 in the series Introduction to Oriental Civilizations. New York: Columbia University Press,
1964. One of the great research tools for students of Asian affairs.
Hawkes, David. Ch’u Tz’u: The Songs of the South. Oxford: Clar-endon Press, 1959. Beautiful
translations of songs from one of the five Confucian classics, The Book of Songs.
Kitagawa, Joseph M., ed. The Religious Traditions of Asia. New York: Macmillan, 1989.
Payne, Robert. Mao Tse-Tung. 1950. New York: Weybright and Talley, 1969. A superlative biography

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and fount of unusual insights, historical comparisons, personal encounters, poetry, and research on
the military strategies of one of the seminal figures of the twentieth century. Mao used his knowledge
of The Art of War to fend off the invading Japanese in World War II and to beat Chiang Kai-chek,
another aficionado of Sun Tzu, in China’s civil war. Payne provides extraordinary sociological
insight into life in China and the workings of military strategy.
———. A Rage for China. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1977. Reminiscences of a witness
to some of the most important events of twentieth-century Chinese history.
———. The White Pony. New York: John Day, 1947. Songs and poetry that would have been heard by
Sun Tzu. Called Ch’u songs and Yüeh fu ballads, they are translated by Payne and some of China’s
best mid-twentieth-century poets and scholars.
Waley, Arthur. The Book of Songs. Boston, New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1937. Also known as The
Book of Odes. One of the five Classics of Confucius, translated for the general reader, and one of the
first—and perhaps the most accessible, after Payne’s The White Pony—of all early Chinese poetry
works in English. Like Lionel Giles, Waley was a great pioneer of translation from Chinese to
English.
Watson, Burton. Early Chinese Literature. New York: Columbia University Press, 1962. A seminal
work of history and criticism; an essential research tool.
———, trans. Courtier and Commoner in Ancient China: Selections from the History of the Former
Han by Pan Ku. New York: Columbia University Press, 1977. Pan Ku’s celebrated and influential
work has been a model for dynastic history since its appearance in the first century A.D. Translated by
a legendary author whose scholarship is breathtaking.
———, trans. Records of the Grand Historian of China: Translated from the Shih chi of Ssu-ma
Chi’en. 2 vols. New York: Columbia University Press, 1961. The great history of early China; sets the
standard for all subsequent historical writing in the East. Filled with fascinating, sometimes amusing,
often horrifying, anecdotes of life, war, and mini-biographies, this book has been compared to
Plutarch’s Lives.