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The Art of War is still on military and business curricula worldwide.

Built the first seismoscope and mapped 2,500 stars.

Physician to gladiators and emperors whose anatomy ruled medicine for 1,400 years.

Founded Madhyamaka Buddhism and its logic of emptiness.

Sanskrit's supreme dramatist; Shakuntala reached Goethe.

Systematised Advaita Vedanta and reorganised Hindu monasticism.

Tang poetry's exuberant genius, memorised across East Asia.

The 'poet-historian' whose verse recorded a dynasty's collapse.

The Pillow Book invented the list-essay a millennium before the internet.

Wrote the world's first psychological novel, a thousand years ago.

Measured Earth's radius to within 1% and wrote the first comparative anthropology of India.

Wrote the medical textbook that trained Europe's doctors until 1650.

Preserved and completed Ibn Sina's corpus.

Described the magnetic compass and deduced geological deep time.

Solved cubics geometrically, reformed the calendar, wrote the Rubaiyat.

Reoriented Islamic thought toward inwardness and challenged the philosophers on their own ground.

Sufi poet whose Masnavi is among the best-selling poetry on Earth today.

Persia's beloved lyric poet; his divan is still consulted as an oracle.

Commissioned Hangul, the alphabet that made Korea literate.

Perfected haiku and the travel journal in The Narrow Road to the Deep North.

Dream of the Red Chamber, China's supreme novel, spawned its own academic field.

First non-European Nobel laureate; wrote two nations' anthems.

Ophthalmologist whose novels ignited the Philippine revolution; executed at 35.

Turned nonviolent resistance into a working political technology.

Poet-philosopher who conceived the idea of Pakistan.

Founded modern Chinese literature and diagnosed a nation in vernacular prose.

Rebuilt Hebrew as a modern literary language.

Wrote Vietnam's declaration of independence quoting Jefferson.

Principal architect of India's constitution and Dalit emancipation.

First Japanese literature laureate; Snow Country and The Old Capital.

Composed the Buru Quartet orally in a prison camp.

Recast famine as a failure of entitlement, not food supply.

Wrote disability, Hiroshima and postwar conscience.

Novelist of Istanbul's melancholy and East–West fracture.

Philosopher of seed sovereignty and critic of industrial agriculture.

Hallucinatory realism of rural Shandong across China's violent century.

Confronts historical trauma and bodily fragility; The Vegetarian, Human Acts.

Shot for going to school; now the youngest Nobel laureate in history.