The Thirty-Six Stratagems in English: A Reader-Friendly Guide

If you came here looking for Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, you are in the right neighborhood but the wrong house. That distinction is made properly in the complete guide — this page is about something narrower and more practical: the order to read these in, and how to stop treating them as a trick list.

I grew up hearing Chinese elders drop these stratagems into ordinary conversation — 走為上計 when somebody knew to walk away from a losing situation, 瞞天過海 when a colleague pulled off a clever deception. It was years before I realised these were not just folk sayings; they belonged to a formal list. And it was several more years before I noticed that almost every English reader I met had read them badly — not because they lacked the translation, but because they read the collection like a manual instead of a vocabulary.

This page is the fix for that.

Key Takeaways

1. The collection is a vocabulary, not a manual. You are learning a way to name a recurring situation, not thirty-six techniques to apply.
2. Do not read it in order. The list runs from confident to desperate; reading straight through teaches you the wrong lessons.
3. Learn three properly, not thirty-six by memory. Three you can explain without notes beat thirty-six you can only recite.
4. Start with number 36. It is the permission most readers do not know they have.
5. Read it alongside a story. Journey to the West demonstrates the patterns in a form you will actually remember.

Before You Start: Two Pages You Should Read First

Two questions come up constantly, and both have their own page here. Reading around them is what makes the rest of this guide usable.

“What are these, and who wrote them?” — The collection is anonymous, was assembled much later than the material it draws on, and has no single argument running through it. That is covered in the complete guide and in the short explainer.

“Which English version should I get?” — This genuinely changes your experience. Verstappen reads best if you are new, von Senger if you want the historical depth, and the bilingual PRC editions if you want the Chinese alongside. I compared the main ones side by side in Thirty-Six Stratagems translations compared.

If you are brand-new to the classics more broadly, start with the Chinese Classics door map to work out which text fits you first.

A Reading Order That Actually Works

Step 1 — Skim the whole list once (30 minutes)

Read all thirty-six names and nothing else. Do not try to memorise, do not stop at the ones that look interesting, do not look anything up. The only goal is range — knowing that the collection starts with bold deception and ends with walking away, and that everything in between is variations on “look at the structure rather than the confrontation.”

The single page that does this fastest is the 36 Stratagems complete guide, which gives all thirty-six with their Chinese names, pinyin, literal meanings, and plain-English translations on one screen.

Step 2 — Work out which group you are in

The collection divides into six groups of six, and the groups are not interchangeable. A stratagem that assumes you are losing is worthless to somebody winning, and vice versa. The six groups are laid out with what each one is for — and what each one is the wrong tool for — in the complete guide.

Do this once and write it down: right now, my main situation is the Defeat group, and the reason is… That sentence is more useful than any stratagem you could memorise this month.

Step 3 — Learn three, properly (about two hours)

Pick one from three different groups, and actually read them:

Read each one until you could explain it to a colleague without notes. That is the actual bar. If you cannot, you have skimmed, not learned.

Step 4 — Practise naming, not using (ongoing, one week)

For one week, do not try to apply anything. Just name what you see: this is a Besiege Wei situation; this is a Retreat situation. You will feel ridiculous doing it. That is the correct response — the skill being built is recognition, and recognition has to be practised in low stakes before it is available in high ones.

This is the whole trick, and it is why the collection works at all. Naming a situation changes what you can do in it far more reliably than picking a clever move does.

Step 5 — Then, and only then, read a full translation

Once you know which three you care about, a complete translation stops being something you work through and starts being something you look things up in. Start with Verstappen; add von Senger later if you want the depth.

How to Avoid Common Mistakes

• Memorising the list. Thirty-six recited formulas are worth less than three you understand. You will not reach for a formula you do not understand.
• Applying a stratagem you are not in a position to use. Most of these assume you are the smaller party. Reaching for one while winning is how people end up over-engineering an easy situation.
• Treating them as manipulation techniques. Several of the most quoted ones — 10, 25, 27, 33 — are straightforward deception dressed in a classical name. Pointed at a friend or anyone who has extended trust, they are not strategy, they are betrayal with good manners. The limits are laid out in the complete guide.
• Reading only the first six. The last six are the ones that teach judgement. Most readers who read the collection stop at number 20 and miss the entire argument it was making.
• Skipping straight to application. The how to apply the 36 Stratagems page is genuinely useful, but it lands much better after you have three under your belt.

The Taoist Connection — Situational Wisdom in Daily Life

This is the part most English translations miss entirely.

The Thirty-Six Stratagems share a deep resonance with Taoist philosophy — specifically the Tao Te Ching — even though they are not Taoist texts and have no genealogical link to one. The connection is in the approach.

If you want to read the Tao Te Ching alongside this, my translation guide will help you choose.

What Taoism Contributes

Taoist thinking emphasises:

• Wu wei (無為): non-forced action — acting in alignment with the situation rather than against it
• Naturalness: recognising the inherent pattern of circumstances
• Indirectness: going around obstacles rather than through them
• Humility: knowing when you are in a losing position

The stratagems operationalise these principles without naming them. When you use Stratagem 36, you are practising wu wei — you recognise that forcing the situation will only make it worse, so you withdraw and wait. When you use Stratagem 1, you are using indirectness — you do not attack the problem head-on, you build a path around it.

In daily life, none of this requires a battlefield:

• In a relationship conflict, Stratagem 36 might mean taking a break instead of escalating the argument you are already losing.
• In a career decision, Stratagem 7 (Create Something from Nothing) might mean building the opportunity rather than waiting to be offered one.
• In a stuck project, Stratagem 19 (Remove the Firewood) means removing the root cause instead of fighting the symptom for a fourth month.

The Taoist reading of all this is simple: do not fight the river. Read the current, and move with it.

Stratagems in Journey to the West

If you want to see the 36 Stratagems working without reading a strategy manual, pick up Journey to the West — the classic Chinese novel about the monk Xuanzang’s pilgrimage to India, accompanied by the Monkey King Sun Wukong.

The novel is saturated with stratagem-shaped situations:

• Stratagem 1 (Deceive the Heavens): Sun Wukong repeatedly uses transformations and illusions — turning into a fly to spy, producing false versions of himself — so that the real action is never where anyone is watching.
• Stratagem 7 (Create Something from Nothing): with no weapon, he makes one from a hair or a cloud. Out of nothing, quite literally.
• Stratagem 23 (Befriend the Distant, Attack the Near): the pilgrims repeatedly stabilise a distant power in order to deal with a nearby threat.
• Stratagem 36 (Retreat): facing an overwhelming demon, the pilgrims withdraw, regroup, and come back with help — which is the entire shape of most of the novel.

Journey to the West is not a strategy textbook. It is a demonstration of the patterns in narrative form, which is a far better way to absorb them. Each episode sets up a situation of a recognisable shape, and the characters respond according to that shape.

Read the two together. Once you have three stratagems in your head, you will start seeing them in the story without trying — and that recognition is the actual point of the whole exercise. To choose an edition, see my Journey to the West reading guide.

Your next step: start with the 36 Stratagems complete guide for the full annotated list, then come back here for the reading order. If you want to see how these pattern-books sit inside the wider tradition they came from, the guide to Chinese culture, traditions and modernity places them alongside the classics and the stories.