[1] Hans Henrik August Bielenstein was born on 8 April 1920 in Stockholm, Sweden.
After the outbreak of the Winter War, 1939–40, he joined the Swedish Voluntary Corps as a commando and fought the Russians in Finnish Lapland.
[3] As Head of the School of Oriental Studies, he built up departments for the languages, literatures and history of China, Japan, Southeast Asia and India.
He was a Guggenheim fellow in 1967–1968, became a Corresponding Member of the Royal Academy of Literature, History, and Antiquity of Sweden in 1980, being appointed to the Dean Lung Chair of Chinese at Columbia University in 1985.
Bielenstein's many books and articles were concerned with Chinese, historiography, history and demography.