Hou was born 6 December 1936 in Lingbao, Henan, China, with his ancestral home in Xianyang, Shaanxi.
[1] He graduated from the Department of Physics of Northwest University in Xi'an in 1959, and conducted research under Wang Chengshu at the Institute of Nuclear Energy of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (now China Institute of Atomic Energy) from 1960 to 1961.
In March 1962, he began working at the Xi'an Institute of Optics and Precision Mechanics (XIOPM).
[2] From 1979 to 1981 he was a visiting scholar at the Physics Department of Imperial College London and conducted research in optics.
He led or participated in the development of eight types of high-speed cameras,[3] which have been used in nuclear tests.