Liping Mao is Professor at the Institute of Qing History at Renmin University of China, specializing in Qing court history and gender history. Her monographs cover Palace Governance: A Study of Women in the Qing Imperial Court, Research on Lower-Class Women in the Qing Dynasty: Centered on Nanbu County and Baxian Archives, A Study of Dowries in the Qing Dynasty, and Statecraft: State Governance and Imperial Household Affairs of the Qing. She also hosts the popular Qing history lecture series A Detailed Account of the Forbidden City on Bilibili to popularize Qing history for the general public.

Ning Xu is currently a Shuimu Scholar and Research Fellow at the Tsinghua Institute for Advanced Study in Humanities and Social Sciences (TIAS). She graduated from the School of Chinese at the University of Hong Kong (HKU). Her research focuses on Ming and Qing women's history, social and economic history, and popular literary documents of the Ming and Qing dynasties. Her doctoral dissertation was nominated for the Li Ka Shing Prizes. Her academic articles have been published in various professional journals.