Margaret MacMillan was educated at the University of Toronto and at Oxford, where she obtained a B. Phil. in politics and a D. Phil. for a thesis on the British in India between 1880 and 1920. She is the editor of Canada and NATO and the author of Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World, which won the 2003 Governor General's Award, the Samuel Johnson Prize, the PEN Hessell Tiltman Prize, the Duff Cooper Prize and was a New York Times Editors' Choice for 2002. Currently, MacMillan lives in Toronto, and is provost of Trinity College and professor of history at the University of Toronto. In 2007, she will become the Warden of St. Anthony’s College, Oxford University.

Seth Faison spent 12 years living in China, mostly as a journalist. As a 25-year-old looking for adventure, he went to Xi'an, an ancient city known for the tomb of the Terra-cotta warriors, and enrolled in Chinese classes at a university. He spent two years studying the language, loving its concise beauty and hating its maddening complexity. He traveled by train, truck and boat, exploring almost every province in China. He became a reporter at the Hong Kong Standard, and within two years became a correspondent in Beijing, where he covered the Tiananmen student movement and massacre for the South China Morning Post. He joined the New York Times in 1991, covering New York City and specializing in Asian Organized Crime and people smuggling. He was part of a team that won the Pulitzer Prize for spot news coverage of the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. In 1995, he was named Bureau Chief in Shanghai, where he served five years, writing about the deep social and economic change underway, and earning a reputation as a writer skilled at capturing the moods and flavors of China.