David Leffman was born and raised in the UK, spent twenty years in Australia, then relocated back to Britain in 2009. Since 1992 he has authored and co-authored guides to Australia, China, Indonesia, Iceland, Malaysia and Hong Kong for Rough Guides, Dorling Kindersley and others, ghost-written a Chinese cookbook, and contributed articles for various publications on subjects ranging from crime to martial arts and history. The Mercenary Mandarin, his biography of William Mesny – a nineteenth-century British adventurer who became a general in the Chinese military – was published in 2016. If he had spare time he'd go scuba diving.www.davidleffman.com