Since the 18th century the United Kingdom has been one of the largest per capita tea consumers in the world, with average per capita supply at 1.9 kg per year.[1] The popularity of tea occasioned the furtive export of slips, a small shoot for planting or twig for grafting to tea plants, from China to British India and its commercial culture there, beginning in 1840; British interests controlled tea production in the subcontinent. Tea, which was an upper-class drink in Europe, became the infusion of every class in Great Britain in the course of the 18th century and has remained so.