Wen Yuan-ning was born in Bangka off Sumatra, formerly of the Dutch East Indies and now of Indonesia, to an immigrant Chinese Hakka family.
He grew up in Bangka and Singapore and went on to study in England where he registered under the Hakka name of Oon Guan-neng at King's College, Cambridge.
In 1946, he was elected National Assembly representative and the same year, he was appointed as the Chinese Ambassador to Greece, a role he served until his recall to Taiwan in 1968.
Wen Yuan-ning was the author of Imperfect Understanding (Kelly and Walsh, Shanghai, 1935), a collection of seventeen profiles of prominent Chinese intellectuals.
His subjects included Hu Shih, Wu Mi, Xu Zhimo, Zhou Zuoren, Wellington Koo, Gu Hongming, Han Fuju, Ma Junwu, Mei Lanfang, George T. Yeh, Y.R.