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36 War Strategies of Ancient China
History
The origins of the Thirty-Six Strategies are unknown. No
author or compiler has ever been mentioned, and no date as to when it may have
been written has been ascertained. The first historical mention of the
Thirty-Six Strategies dates back to the Southern Chi dynasty (AD 489-537) where
it is mentioned in the Nan Chi Shi (History of the Southern Chi Dynasty). It
briefly records, "Of the 36 stratagems of Master Tan, running away is the
best." Master Tan may be the famous general Tan Daoji (d. AD 436) but there
is no evidence to either prove or disprove his authorship. While this is the
first recorded mention of Thirty-Six Strategies, some of the proverbs themselves
are based on events that occurred up to seven hundred years earlier. For
example, the strategy #8 'Openly
Repair the Walkway, Secretly March to Chencang' is based on a tactic
allegedly used by the founder of the Han dynasty, Gaozu, to escape from Szechwan
in 223 BC. The strategy #2 `Besiege
Wei to Rescue Zhao' is named after an incident that took place even
earlier in 352 BC and is attributed to the famous strategist Sun Bin.
All modern versions of the Thirty-Six Strategies are derived
from a tattered book discovered at a roadside vendor's stall in Szechwan in
1941. It turned out to be a reprint of an earlier book dating back to the late
Ming or early Ching dynasty entitled, The Secret Art of War, The Thirty-Six
Strategies. There was no mention of who the authors or compilers were or when it
was originally published. A reprint was first published for the general public
in Beijing in 1979. Since then several Chinese and English language versions
have been published in China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan.
Without any other information, current speculations about the
origins of the Thirty-Six Strategies suggest that there was no single author.
More likely they were simply a collection of idiomatic expressions taken from
popular Chinese folklore, history, and myths. They may have first been recorded
by general Tan and handed down verbally or in manuscript form for centuries. It
is believed that sometime in the early Ching dynasty some enterprising editor
collected them together and published them in the form that comes down to us
today.
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