Tsai Wan-lin (Chinese: 蔡萬霖; pinyin: Caì Wànlín) (November 10, 1924–September 27, 2004) was a Taiwanese businessman who, at the time of his death, was the richest man in Taiwan with a fortune of US$4.6 billion (NT$156.3 billion). He was ranked #94 worldwide in the 2004 Forbes Rich List. He founded the large Lin Yuan Group, a banking and insurance group.
He was born into a poor farmer's family in Miaoli, and started out in Taipei by selling vegetables and soybeans with his brothers as a child. Tsai did not attend college.
With one of his brothers Tsai joined Taipei's Tenth Credit Cooperative in 1960. Two years later, they founded the Cathay Life Insurance Company, which at the time of his death was the largest life insurance company in Taiwan.
After establishing firm family control over Cathay Life in 1979, they founded the Lin Yuan Group. Over the next 10 years, the Lin Yuan Group expanded to become the largest Taiwanese conglomerate. The bank, life insurance and venture capital businesses merged in 2001 to become Cathay Financial Holdings, Taiwan's largest financial holding company.
Tsai was first listed by Forbes as a billionaire in 1987.
Tsai was one of the generation of hard-driven, self-made entrepreneurs who turned the offshore Chinese island into a prosperous "Asian tiger" economy, despite its long-running armed stand-off with the communist mainland and its political isolation from the rest of the world.
Tsai Wan-lin's greatest rival was his own younger brother, Tsai Wan-tsai, who commands a $2 billion-plus fortune of his own as the head of the Fubon Financial group.
Tsai Wan-lin, who was also a senior adviser to Taiwan's President Chen Shui-bien, was ranked by Forbes magazine as the 94th richest man in the world; but he lived modestly and shunned publicity.
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