Chan Wing-tsit was born on 18 August 1901 in Kaiping, a city in China's southern Guangdong Province.
There he studied with Irving Babbitt, William Ernest Hocking, and Alfred North Whitehead, and was advised by James Haughton Woods, an eminent Sanskritist and translator of the Yoga Sutra.
He was also the author of articles on Chinese philosophy, Classical Confucian texts, Ou-Yang Hsiu, and Wang Yang-Ming in the Macropedia of the Encyclopædia Britannica (15th edition, 1977 imprint).
He expressed particular satisfaction over his chapter, The path to wisdom: Chinese philosophy and religion, in the book, Half the World: The History and Culture of China and Japan (1973), edited by Arnold J.
Chan Fellowships Program was established in his memory by the Lingnan Foundation in 2000, and fellowships are awarded annually to students of Lingnan University (Hong Kong) and Sun Yat-sen University (Guangzhou).