Editorial standards & methodology

Purpose

Sun Tzu Daily exists to make The Art of War usable. The source text is short, compressed, and two and a half thousand years old; most readers meet it as scattered quotations and leave without a method. We publish one lesson a day that pairs a real passage with a plain-English reading and a single concrete action, so the book can actually change how someone decides, competes, negotiates, or leads.

The site is an independent editorial project. It is not affiliated with any publisher, translation rights holder, or institution.

The translation we quote

Every quotation on the site is taken from the Lionel Giles translation of The Art of War (1910), the standard public-domain English edition, translated from the Chinese. We use it for consistency and because its wording can be freely quoted and checked. Where a passage is a faithful paraphrase rather than a verbatim Giles rendering, the lesson is explicitly flagged as a paraphrase — we never present our own wording as the historical text. The original Chinese is shown wherever it exists in our records.

Details of the source and why translations differ: see Source & translation.

How lessons are selected

The daily lesson is a deterministic rotation through a fixed pool of 242 lessons — one per day, the same for every reader on the same calendar day (publication timezone: Asia/Taipei). The rotation means every lesson page is permanent: it exists whether or not it is "today’s" lesson, and nothing is published before it enters the pool.

Topics are chosen for practical relevance — competition, negotiation, leadership, investing, risk, timing, decision-making — and each is filed under strategy categories and chapters so the same idea can be reached several ways.

How we keep the text honest

Every lesson page separates two layers visually and structurally: the quotation (Sun Tzu’s words, with chapter attribution and translation credit) and the interpretation (our original editorial content — the principle, what it means, where it sits in the chapter, a modern example, and the common misreading). Commentary is never presented as the words of Sun Tzu, and we do not publish attributed quotations we cannot source to the Giles text.

Where a popular "Sun Tzu quote" in circulation is actually a modern paraphrase or invention, we either flag it as a paraphrase or do not use it. Where scholarship is unsettled — for example, questions about the historical Sun Wu — our history and source pages say so plainly rather than choosing a dramatic story.

How interpretation and frameworks are created

Interpretations are original editorial work: each lesson translates the classical passage into a principle, a plain-English explanation, one modern application, a concrete example, and — because The Art of War is compressed and easily over-read — the misreading we most often see. Strategy category guides add original frameworks, principles, and examples built on the same source passages.

Modern examples are illustrative scenarios unless they describe well-known public events; we do not present invented cases as fact, and investing-flavored lessons are historical strategy, not financial advice.

Editorial review and corrections

Lessons and guides are reviewed on a rolling basis — wording, sourcing, and usefulness — and improved in place rather than republished as duplicates. If you find a misattributed quotation, a translation error, or an interpretation that overreaches the source, we want to fix it: use the contact channel on the About page. Corrections are applied to the permanent lesson page so the fix is where readers actually are.

Use of AI

AI-assisted tools are used in this project’s workflow — research support, drafting support, classification of lessons into categories, and code. They are tools under an editorial process, not the publisher: topic selection, sourcing standards, the verbatim-or-paraphrase distinction, site structure, and publication decisions are governed by the editorial standards on this page, and every published page must stand on the rules above regardless of how the first draft was produced.

We disclose this plainly rather than implying a human newsroom we do not have. What we will never do: fabricate authors, credentials, testimonials, or engagement.

What this site is not

Not a quote-mill: the quotation is the source material, not the product. Not financial, legal, or professional advice: strategy commentary is for reflection and practice. And not a museum piece: the test for every lesson is whether a real person can use it the same day they read it.