Originally known as Wan Jiabao. The origin of Cao Yu's pen name is because his family name is "Wan" (万), so he split the word "Wan" into "草禺" (草禺), and because "草" doesn't look like a family name, he took the harmonic word "Cao" (曹禺), and the combination of the two gave him the name Cao Yu. "

Cao Yu is a Chinese character who was born in the late 19th century, and is now known as Cao Yu.

Cao Yu is the most accomplished playwright in the history of modern Chinese drama. Since his childhood, Cao Yu has been traveling with his stepmother to various theaters to listen to music and watch plays, so the seeds of drama have been sown in his heart since he was a child. His representative works include Thunderstorm, Sunrise, The Wilderness, and Peking Man.

Cao Yu was born on September 24, 1910, in Xiaobailou, Tianjin, and his mother, Xue, died of puerperal fever three days later. Xue's twin sister, Xue Yongnan, married Cao Yu's father and took on the burden of raising him.

In 1913, at the age of three, he went to the theater with his stepmother and was able to watch traditional Chinese plays such as Peking Opera, Hebei Opera, Shanxi Opera, Tangshan Rock Opera, and the Civilization Opera, which laid a certain foundation for his future creative work. 1922, he was admitted to the Nankai High School in the fall of the year as a second-year intermediate student. During his school years, he actively participated in various theater activities and joined the Nankai New Drama Troupe.

In 1929, his father died of a stroke. In September of the same year, he was transferred from Nankai University to the second year of the Department of Western Literature at Tsinghua University, where he devoted himself to the study of theater, reading extensively from ancient Greek tragedies to Shakespeare's plays and those of Chekhov, Ibsen, and O'Neill, which had a great influence on his later works.