---
type: Person
title: Mei Lin
description: The Canton merchant who co-founded the merchant house Thornbury & Lin
  and ran its Canton side of the tea and coffee trade.
tags:
- tea
- coffee
- trade
- china
resource: raw/tea-history-and-trade.md
timestamp: '2026-07-16T16:02:37Z'
citadel_version: 0.3.0
---

Mei Lin was a Canton merchant of formidable reach who knew the inland tea districts and the men who controlled them.[^s1] Together with the English trader [Sir Edmund Thornbury](sir-edmund-thornbury.md), Mei Lin co-founded the merchant house [Thornbury & Lin](../organizations/thornbury-lin.md), which first brought tea to England in 1657.[^s1] Within the partnership, Mei Lin worked the Canton waterfront — arranging the chests, judging the grades, and seeing that what was promised in the spring was actually loaded by autumn.[^s1]

The partnership with Thornbury was unusual for its day: rather than dealing at arm's length through middlemen, as most traders did, Mei Lin and Thornbury shared the risk and the knowledge of the trade directly, a true partnership stretched across half the globe.[^s2]

According to the firm's own family history, Mei Lin was a tea master's daughter from Canton, raised among drying racks and warming woks, with a palate precise enough that her father trusted her to grade the spring pluck before she could properly read; when [Sir Edmund Thornbury](sir-edmund-thornbury.md)'s ships called at Canton, she refused to sell him the inferior tea reserved for foreigners and instead sold him the good stock, at a price that made him laugh and shake her hand.[^s3] The two later married.[^s4] She is also remembered as the keeper of a recipe book, later called the Green Ledger, in which she recorded blends by mood as well as by ingredient — see [Thornbury & Lin](../organizations/thornbury-lin.md) for the blends that still draw on it today.[^s5]

## See also
- [Thornbury & Lin](../organizations/thornbury-lin.md)
- [Sir Edmund Thornbury](sir-edmund-thornbury.md)
- [History of Tea](../concepts/history-of-tea.md)

## Sources
[^s1]: [raw/tea-history-and-trade.md](../../raw/tea-history-and-trade.md), line 21 — Mei Lin's background, the co-founding, and the role running the Canton end (ingested 2026-07-16)
[^s2]: [raw/tea-history-and-trade.md](../../raw/tea-history-and-trade.md), line 23 — the unusual, direct nature of the partnership (ingested 2026-07-16)
[^s3]: [raw/thornbury-tea-blog.md](../../raw/thornbury-tea-blog.md), line 9 — Mei Lin's background as a tea master's daughter and how she met Thornbury in Canton, per the firm's own family history (ingested 2026-07-16)
[^s4]: [raw/thornbury-tea-blog.md](../../raw/thornbury-tea-blog.md), line 11 — Mei Lin and Thornbury married (ingested 2026-07-16)
[^s5]: [raw/thornbury-tea-blog.md](../../raw/thornbury-tea-blog.md), line 23 — the Green Ledger, Mei Lin's recipe book recording blends by mood (ingested 2026-07-16)
