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John Edye was a shipwright and navy man who worked as Master Shipwright at the Royal Navy Dockyard at Trincomali (modern Trincomalee, Sri Lanka) for five years coinciding with 1829. He then worked at the Chatham Dockyard by at least 1832 before moving to the Department of the Surveyor of the Navy in 1834. Edye was made Chief Clerk at the Surveyor of the Navy's office and worked with Surveyor William Symonds on his many new designs for the Royal Navy's sailing fleet.

Edye's experience in Southern India gave him an expertise and interest in the region's maritime context which continued even after he returned to Britain. He contributed papers reporting on the state of Southern India's ships, ports and natural products to the Royal Asiatic Society's journals in 1834 and 1835, and was approved as a member of the Society in 1835 before retiring from the Society's affairs in 1843.

Joseph Edkins was a British Protestant missionary who spent 57 years in China. He was a Sinologue, specialising in Chinese religions. He was also a linguist, a translator, and a philologist ad was author of many books about the Chinese language and the Chinese religions especially Buddhism. Born in Gloucestershire he became a Protestant minister and was sent by the London Missionary Society, to Shanghai. He worked in the London Missionary Society Press and undertook the translation of many western scientific works into Chinese. He was an active member of the North China Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society.

He returned to England in 1858 and was married to Jane Rowbotham Stobbs. They returned to Shanghai. In 1860 the Edkins family moved to Yantai, Shandong, and in 1861 to Tianjin. After his first wife's death he married Janet Wood White i 1863 and they moved to Beijing. He travelled to England in 1873 but was back in China by 1876.

In 1880 he resigned from the London Missionary Society to become a translator for the Chinese Imperial Maritime Customs. He was widowed a second time in 1877 and married Johanna Schmidt in 1881. He was appointed to edit and translate a series of Western scientific works into Chinese, resulting in 16 Primers for Western Knowledge (西學啟蒙十六種) published in 1898, which comprised textbooks about zoology, botany, chemistry, geography, physiology, logic and other subjects. In 1903 he survived typhoid and was still writing at the age of 81. He died in Shanghai on Easter Sunday, 1905.

John Fisher Turner was born in 1881, the son of a barrister. He was educated at Rugby and the Royal Marine Academy at Woolwich before being commissioned into the Royal Engineers in 1900. He served in the North-west Frontier in 1908 and became the Chief Engineer of the Royal Air Force, India, from 1928-1931. He is remembered for his ingenuity in designing decoy sites in Britain during World War II. He died on 21 May 1958. He never married.

John George Taylor was an archaeologist, son of Captain [later Colonel] R. Taylor, who was the Assistant Political Agent in Basra from 1818-1822. John Taylor was appointed the Hon. East India Company's Agent and H.M. Vice-Consul at Basra from 8 August 1851 to 30 September 1858, and from 1859 H.M. Consul-General for Kurdistan at Diyarbekir and Erzerum. He excavated at Ur (1854) as a direct result of an earlier visit by William Kennett Loftus (q.v.), and at Abu Shahrain and Tell al-Lahm (1855). He must also have returned to Ur in 1858.

In 1861 he recovered stelae of Ashurnasirpal II and Shalmaneser III at Kurkh near Diyarbekir, and he was commissioned to excavate in this region on behalf of the British Museum.