John C. H. Wu was born in Ningbo, China, in 1899, and educated under the traditional Chinese system before the beginning of the new Republic of China. After studying with outstanding legal thinkers in the United States, Germany, and France in the 1920s, he returned to Shanghai as a judge, lawyer and legislator who wrote the first draft of the nation's constitution. In 1937, during a time of national turmoil and personal spiritual crisis, he returned to Christianity (to which he had first been introduced in his youth) and became a Catholic. In the war-torn decade of the 1940s, he escaped (with his large family) Japanese captivity in Hong Kong, translated the Psalms and New Testament into Classical Chinese at the commission of China's president, Chiang Kai-Shek, and served as Nationalist China's ambassador to the Holy See from 1946 to 1949. Exiled from China by the Communist revolution in 1949, Wu taught law and Asian philosophy at Seton Hall University until retiring to Taiwan in 1967, where he became the honorary president of Chinese Culture University.