Chinese emperors claimed him as their biological ancestor, millions worship him as a god, and modern anarchists and libertarians both call him a founding father, yet historians are not sure Laozi ever lived. This episode reconstructs the elusive figure behind Taoism and the Tao Te Ching, from the meaning of his title (old master) and the names Li Er and Lao Dan to the fierce chronological debate that placed him as either a sixth-century BC contemporary of Confucius or a much later composite.

We examine the 1993 Guodian bamboo slips that swung scholarly opinion back, then walk through Sima Qian's three conflicting biographies: the royal archivist who walked away from a collapsing Zhou court, Lao Laizi teaching his warrior son to bury the enemy dead, and the 80-year-old astrologer stopped at the border gate by the guard Yinxi. Finally we unpa ...