Xu Yuanchong was born in Nanchang, central China's Jiangxi Province, in 1921. In 1938, he was admitted to the Department of Foreign Languages in the National Southwestern Associated University, a temporary merger of the prestigious Peking University, Tsinghua University and Nankai University during China's War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression (1937-45). He continued his studies at Tsinghua University in Beijing, and later in Paris, after the war. In the 1980s, he became a professor at Peking University.

Xu has translated many Chinese classics such as Book of Poetry, The Analects of Confucius, 300 Tang Poems—an anthology of poems from the Tang Dynasty (618-907) and Romance of the Western Bower—a 700-year-old love comedy into English and French. He has also adapted a number of English and French classics into Chinese, including John Dryden's All for Love, Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary, Stendhal's The Red and the Black and Romain Rolland's Jean-Christophe.