As often happens with early Chinese writers, what little biographical information there is for Yü Hsin mostly concerns his official career. What we have is a list of titles – a relatively long list, since he was unusually successful as writers go. His biographies, as usual, are vague about the dates when he held a given post; at best, we may be told that it was during a certain reign. Theoretically the annals section of the histories should help in such cases, since appointments to important positions are normally recorded there under a specific date. Unfortunately, Yü's positions under the Liang were too low to be mentioned in the relatively complete annals for that dynasty. He rose rather high under the Northern Chou, but those annals are fragmentary and remarkably uninformative. We are thus forced to rely on inference; the following is confined to what the available evidence will reasonably support.

Yü Hsin (T. Tzu-shan, also known by his title k'ai-fu), was born in 513. We know almost nothing about his education except that he was particularly interested in the Tso chuan. His writings do show a fondness for that work, as well as an extraordinarily wide range of reading in general and an exceptional memory. We should remember that this was still the age of the manuscript, and that there were very few large collections of books anywhere in China.