Non-Leptonic Decays of Beauty Hadrons -- from Phenomenology to Theory

`Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old' Franz Kafka. In the last few years considerable progress has been achieved in our understanding of the decays of heavy flavour hadrons. One can now calculate inclusive transition rates in QCD proper through an expansion in inverse powers of the heavy flavour quark mass without recourse to phenomenological assumptions. The non-perturbative contributions are treated systematically in this way; they are found to produce corrections of order a few percent in beauty decays, i.e. typically somewhat smaller than the perturbative corrections. One finds, among other things: (a) The lifetime of $B^-$ mesons is predicted to be longer than that of $B^0$ mesons by several percent. (b) The QCD prediction for the semileptonic branching ratio of $B$ mesons appears to exceed present experimental values. We discuss the implications of this discrepancy. The phenomenological engineering that has been developed for the description of {\em exclusive} two-body modes of $B$ mesons has reached a mature stage and awaits more precise and detailed experimental tests. First steps towards a genuine QCD treatment of these modes are being made.