It is inevitable that ancient books are copied incorrectly or books are missing. In order to preserve them completely, people have been sorting out ancient books. Is the collation of the literature on the art of war in the Western Han Dynasty based on Hanshu? Where's Yi? There are three records in the history of Sun Tzu's Art of War. The first time was in the early years of the Western Han Dynasty. "Sean and Han Xin formulated the art of war, and every 182 school was deleted and used, and 35 schools were set up." These thirty-five books were the essence of the official art of war at that time, but I don't know if Sun Tzu's Art of War was selected. However, Han Xin often used Sun Tzu's Art of War as a flexible criterion when fighting, which Gai Ke could infer. The second collation was in the period of Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty, when "military and political servants stayed behind and retired, and recorded". For the third time, The Art of War was organized into the era of filial piety. At that time, a large-scale collection of books was carried out nationwide, and Dr. Liu Xiang of Guanglu was responsible for the rectification of the school. Hong Ren, the captain of the infantry, is responsible for the management of military books, and the sorted military books are included in Seven Outlooks. The position of Sun Tzu's Art of War in the study of military science was established after three times of sorting out the military books in the Western Han Dynasty. According to this arrangement, "Hong Ren's military tactics theory can be divided into four categories: military tactics, military forms, military yin and yang, and military skills, while Sun Tzu's art of war ranks first in tactics. After the fall of Qilu, some basic contents were written by Ban Gu's Hanshu. Art and literature have been preserved. But what about Han Shu? Sun Tzu's Art of War recorded in Yi Wen Zhi is eighty-two. Bi Yixun, a scholar in Qing Dynasty, pointed out the reason for the sudden increase of narrative articles in Sun Tzu's Art of War, and thought that the remaining 69 articles were all lost by Sun Wu, which was caused by the continuous increase of Sun Wu and his disciples on the basis of 13 articles.
At the end of the Eastern Han Dynasty, Cao Cao and others began to annotate the Art of War. Cao Cao's annotation of Sun Tzu's Art of War is called "a brief explanation" in the preface, which is the earliest annotation of Sun Tzu's Art of War in the world. Apart from the first annotation, Cao Cao made two contributions to the Art of War. One is that he respects Sun Tzu's Art of War, which he thinks is the best of all the art books, and further establishes the status of Sun Tzu's Art of War. The second is to restore thirteen prototypes, and distinguish a huge number of eighty-five pieces of Sun Tzu's Art of War since the Han Dynasty. Only thirteen pieces are annotated, and the contents other than thirteen pieces are compiled into two volumes of Sun Tzu's Art of War. Cao Cao's notes are concise and to the point, with high military artistic value, and have been praised and respected by people since they came out. There are many note writers after Cao Cao, and everyone is different. Until the Song Dynasty, there were ten famous note writers handed down. The appearance of a large number of annotated books promoted the wide spread of Sun Tzu's Art of War, and formed different version systems in the process of circulation. The main editions of Sun Tzu's The Art of War in the Song Dynasty are Seven Books on Military Classics and Ten Records of Sun Tzu. In the Ming dynasty, the seven books of Wu Jing were the mainstream. In the Qing Dynasty, Sun Xingyan copied Ten Notes from Daozang, and made careful collation and textual research, which made it famous and broke the situation that it was mainly circulated by martial arts classics since the Song Dynasty. Sun Xiao's Ten Records of Sun Tzu has thus become the most widely circulated, influential and practical reader of Sun Tzu's Art of War in modern times.
1972, Sun Tzu's Art of War was unearthed from the Han Tomb in Yinque Mountain, Linyi, Shandong Province, which is the earliest manuscript of Sun Tzu's Art of War discovered so far. According to expert research, it was written at least several decades earlier than historical records. It makes us notice that (1) the current version and the simplified version are basically the same except that the order of individual sentences is changed and words are added or subtracted. (2) Although quotations from ancient books before the Song Dynasty were quoted, modified, added and deleted, they still reflected the original appearance of ancient books to a considerable extent, and were closer to the simplified version than now. (3) Although there are differences between various versions since the Song Dynasty, compared with the simplified version, these differences are insignificant, and many of them are caused by copying and re-engraving.