Anthony François Paulus Hulsewé (31 January 1910 – 16 December 1993) was a Dutch sinologist, scholar, educator, and author, best known for his studies of ancient Chinese law, particularly that of the Han dynasty (220 BC – AD 206).

Anthony François Paulus Hulsewé was born on 31 January 1910 in Berlin, Germany, where his father worked for a German firm as an electrical engineer. Hulsewé's family was from the Dutch province of Groningen and had traditionally been clergymen in the Dutch Reformed Church, though his grandfather chose to go into farming and business instead of church service. Hulsewé lived in Germany for the first several years of his life, but his parents became concerned about the increasing deprivations of World War I and sent him and his siblings back to the Netherlands to live with an aunt in Arnhem. Hulsewé's parents finally left Germany in 1919, and the family settled in Bussum, a small town about 15 miles (24 km) east of Amsterdam.

During the early 20th century, the Dutch government offered national scholarships for university students to study Chinese and Japanese in order to ensure a supply of competent officials and administrators in the Dutch East Indies. After completing secondary school in 1927, Hulsewé took and passed the competitive examination for one of these scholarships, entering Leiden University in the autumn of 1928 to study Chinese under the prominent Dutch sinologist J.J.L. Duyvendak. His only classmate during his first year was Marius van der Valk (1908–1978), who studied Chinese and law, and later became a professor of modern Chinese law at Leiden.

Although the scholarships were intended to allow students to prepare to be colonial officials, Duyvendak required his students to intensively study Classical Chinese and the philological methods of sinology. Duyvendak's Chinese assistant Chang T'ien-tse, a native of Fujian Province, provided them with instruction in modern Mandarin Chinese as well as some basic training in Hokkien Chinese, which was the language of most of the Chinese residents of the Dutch East Indies.

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