Confucius — the Latinised form of Kong Fuzi, 'Master Kong' — was born around 551 BCE in the state of Lu, in what is now Shandong. His era was the late Spring and Autumn period: the Zhou house had crumbled, the warring states devoured one another, and the old ritual order (*li*) was collapsing. He was less philosopher than teacher-counsellor, knocking on the doors of many rulers and finding employment with few.

At the heart of his teaching are four concepts that try to make human relations humane. *Ren* (仁) — humaneness, recognising another as kin to oneself; *li* (禮) — the inherited forms that hold family, state, and ritual together; *xiao* (孝) — devotion to parents and ancestors; *junzi* (君子) — the cultivated person whose nobility is character, not birth. Order is not imposed from above by law but grows from within, as each person cultivates *ren*. His version of the Golden Rule — 'do not impose on others what you do not wish for yourself' — is among the oldest recorded.

Confucius wrote nothing. The *Lunyu* (*Analects*), the collection of sayings on which his fame rests, was assembled by students of his students between the 5th and 3rd centuries BCE. For more than two thousand years the Chinese imperial examination system was built on these and other Confucian texts — few sayings of a single teacher have remained the spine of a state for so long.

Confucius lived in the same century as the Greek pre-Socratics, but he turned a different question. Where they asked 'what is the world made of?', he asked 'what is a good society made of?'. Eastern philosophy thus took its shape around practical ethics, Greek philosophy around cosmology — two separate routes out of myth.