Ji Cheng was a practicing garden designer in the first half of the 17th century. He designed gardens for several well-known individuals in the late Ming dynasty, who supported the original publication of this book.Alison Hardie, a graduate of Oxford and Edinburgh Universities, began to translate The Craft of Gardens in the 1980s. She is a Senior Lecturer in Chinese Studies at the University of Leeds, and internationally known as a scholar of Chinese garden history.Zhong Ming is an artist whose work has been exhibited in many countries including China, France, the UK, Japan and Sweden. He divides his time between China, France and the UK.