China: the essential lives

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

Standardised papermaking, the substrate of recorded civilisation.

Built the first seismoscope and mapped 2,500 stars.

Treatise on Cold Damage remains a foundation of Chinese medicine.

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

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

Built an astronomical clock tower with the first known escapement chain drive.

Described the magnetic compass and deduced geological deep time.

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

First great synthesiser of Chinese and Western medicine; his case records still teach clinicians.

Three Principles of the People underwrote the republican transformation of China.

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

Rescued acupuncture from abolition and rebuilt it on anatomical terms with filiform needles.

Wrote New Acupuncture (1951) and led the state institute that standardised the practice.

Master physician of Guangzhou whose spleen-stomach theory shaped modern TCM curricula.

Personal physician to the Dalai Lama who preserved Tibetan medicine through 17 years of imprisonment.

Extracted artemisinin from ancient texts; millions of malaria deaths averted.

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