After a prolonged stay in Shanghai studying Mandarin, Anton received his BA in Area Studies with a focus on East Asia with a minor in classical Chinese literature from Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. He did his MA in Chinese Studies at Freie Universität Berlin, researching Chinese ethnic nationalism and Muslim identity construction in the early 20th century. In the meantime, he has also been an exchange student at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, National Taiwan University and Peking University. Since 2019 Anton has been working as a librarian at the Asian-/African Studies and Islamic Theology Branch Library, tasked with organizing Chinese literature. In October 2022, as a PhD candidate at the EXC 2020 "Temporal Communities: Doing Literature in a Global Perspective" and the Friedrich Schlegel Graduiertenschule für Literaturwissenschaftliche Studien, Anton Terhechte has begun researching the classification and organization of Islamic literature on the bookshelves of modern China.

Current research includes an EXC 2020 project, The Chinese Bookshelf of Islam: A World Religion's Place in Modern China's Literary Landscape (2022-).