Dagmar Schaefer is director of the Centre for Chinese Studies and Professor of Chinese Studies at the University of Manchester. She is the author of The Emperor's Silk Clothes: State-Run Silk Manufacturing in the Ming Period, 1368 1644 (1998) and The Crafting of the 10,000 Things: Knowledge and Technology in 17th-Century China (2011) and the co-author of Weaving an Economic Pattern in Ming Times, 1368 1644 (2002).