Since the 18th century, the United Kingdom is one of the world's greatest tea consumers per capita, with an average per capita tea supply of 1.9 kg (4.18 Ibs) 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.