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 o.

An invasion was planned on the pretext of pacifying the region, but Liu An
insisted that such a plan ran counter to the principles of “sustaining the perishing,
reviving the extinct.” Liu An's memorial spends much space demonstrating the
folly of ...