Alfred Ernest Wileman was born on February 27, 1860, in Uttoxeter, Staffordshire, England.

He was a British diplomat and entomologist. He was appointed a Student Interpreter in Japan in 1882. In 1889, he was promoted a First Class Assistant at the Hiogo and Osaka Consular District. In 1891-1892, Wileman became Assistant Japanese Secretary and Acting Vice-Consul in Tokyo. He then served as the Acting Registrar to the Supreme Court for Japan in Yokohama (1896-1897). He was officially promoted to be the Vice-Consul at Hiogo and Osaka on December 28, 1896, and was several times Acting Consul there during 1898, residing at Kobe. Wileman was appointed as the British Vice Consul for the Japanese city of Hakodate and surrounding prefectures in April 1901 and moved to be consul to Taiwan in 1903 and to the then Territory of Hawaii in 1908. In 1909, he was appointed Consul-General to the Philippines (then a US territory). Wileman was an accomplished amateur lepidopterist, owning one of the largest and most comprehensive collections of Japanese, Formosan and Philippine butterflies and moths ever assembled by a single individual. After his death, his widow Mabel Sarah Wileman donated his collection of butterflies and moths to the Natural History Department of the British Museum, now the Natural History Museum in London.

In 1918, he married Mabel Sarah Gaskell Grundy (1869–1952). He died on February 15, 1929, while vacationing in Merton, France.