Ts'ao was born into a wealthy family in Hupei Province and already had demonstrated his love for the theater by the time he was in the elite Nankai Middle School in Tianjin, where he was active in dramatics. Later at Tsinghua University he continued to work backstage and to act (even performing once as Ibsen's Nora!), and he immersed himself in Western drama. After graduation he became an instructor in the National Institute of Drama in wartime Chungking, Szechuan.
However, it was in the writing of plays that Ts'ao actually made his greatest contribution. Although modern Chinese theater had been in existence ever since Hung Shen had returned from America in 1921, many of the earliest plays produced in China had tended to be quite didactic in nature. But Ts'ao Yu's plays were something new. Although he borrowed heavily from a wide variety of Western playwrights---from the ancient Greeks to Chekhov---his subject matter was thoroughly Chinese, and the people loved it. Thunderstorm (1934), produced in 1935 by the Fu Tan Drama Society upon Hung Shen's recommendation, was an immediate box office success. Sunrise (1935), The Wilderness, Metamorphosis, Peking Man, and The Family followed shortly after, all within the space of a few short years, before the disruptions of the Sino-Japanese War. These works are still among the most popular in the Chinese drama repertoire, and are often produced. In Hong Kong in the 1970s, a Ts'ao Yu Festival was carried out.
As Joseph Lao wrote in his study of Ts'ao Yu, the play Peking Man is perhaps his most mature product, in which for the first time he actually utilizes the drama's unique potential for the "art of showing."However, Thunderstorm is perhaps his best-known play, depicting a day in the life of the Chao family, when suddenly old secrets are exposed and family unity begins to unravel. It is humid, and a thunderstorm is brewing, both metaphorically and literally.
Ts'ao Yu lived in the United States with the fiction writer Lao