This is tricky stuff. Firstly, it’s hard to reach some sort of consensus on whether or not his name was Lao-Tsu, Laocius, Laotze or, as most Chinese know him, Laozi. What most scholars seem to agree upon is the fact that he was a philosopher born around 604 BC, he wrote the Tao Te Ching (also referred to, confusingly, as Laozi), and he was a founder of Taoism — the philosophical idea of living in harmony with the ‘path’ that is now followed by a reported 400 million people in China alone.