Max Müller, was a German-born philologist and Orientalist, a founder in the western academic field of Indian studies. He was born in Dessau and was educated in Leipzig. In 1850, he was appointed deputy Taylorian professor of modern European languages at Oxford University and in 1868 was made Oxford's first Professor of Comparative Philology. "The Sacred Books of the East", a 50-volume set of English translations, was prepared under his direction. He also promoted the idea of a Turanian family of languages.
Edward Fitzgerald was an English poet and writer, best known as the poet of the first and most famous English translation of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. He was born in Suffolk, lived part of his childhood in France, and attended Trinity College, Cambridge. He became a lifelong friend of Bernard Quaritch who published his the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám in 1857, at first anonymously.
Monier Monier-Williams was the second Boden Professor of Sanskrit at Oxford University, England. He studied, documented and taught Asian languages, especially Sanskrit, Persian and Hindustani. He was born in Mumbai, but educated in England. He taught at the East India Company College from 1844 until 1858. In 1860 he stood against Max Müller, and was appointed, for the position of Boden Chair of Sanskrit at Oxford University after the death of Horace Hayman Wilson. He was knighted in 1876.
James Legge was a Scottish sinologist, missionary, and scholar, best known as an early and prolific translator of Classical Chinese texts into English. Legge served as a representative of the London Missionary Society in Malacca and Hong Kong (1840–1873) and was the first Professor of Chinese at Oxford University (1876–1897). In association with Max Müller he prepared the Sacred Books of the East series, published in 50 volumes between 1879 and 1891.
Sir Edwin Arnold was an English poet and journalist. He was born in Gravesend, Kent, and educated in Rochester and Oxford before becoming a schoolmaster in Birmingham. In 1856 he went to India as Principal of the Government Sanskrit College at Poona. He returned to England in 1861 and worked as a journalist for the Daily Telegraph. He was best known as a poet and specifically for interpreting Eastern philosophy and life in English verse. His chief work with this object is "The Light of Asia", or "The Great Renunciation", a poem of eight books in blank verse.
Sir Ernest Mason Satow was born in London and educated at Mill Hill School and University College, London. Satow was an exceptional linguist, an energetic traveller, a writer of travel guidebooks, a dictionary compiler, a mountaineer, a keen botanist, and a major collector of Japanese books and manuscripts on all kinds of subjects. He served in Japan and China as a diplomat and was Britain's second plenipotentiary at the Second Hague Peace Conference.