Recent developments and selected topics in low-energy QCD are summarized, from chiral effective field theory to systems with strange and charm quarks, from lattice QCD to precision experiments.1. Prelude: scales and symmetry breaking patterns 4.2 GeV, m t 174 GeV). The low-energy, long wavelength limit of QCD is expressed in terms of different types of effective field theories, depending on the quark masses involved: i) Low-energy QCD with light quarks is realized in the form of an effective field theory with spontaneously broken chiral symmetry, expanded around the (chiral) limit of massless quarks. The active degrees of freedom are the Nambu-Goldstone bosons of this spontaneously broken symmetry, identified with the lightest pseudoscalar mesons. The small expansion parameters are the quark masses, m q , together with low energy/momentum as compared to the characteristic chiral symmetry breaking scale, 4πf π ∼ 1 GeV (with the pion decay constant f π 0.09 GeV).ii) Low-energy QCD with heavy quarks is also realized in the form of an effective field theory, non-relativistic QCD, in which a systematic expansion is now controlled by the inverse quark mass, 1/m Q . This expansion is valid for the heaviest (b-and t-) quarks and,