Few things seem as typically British as a cup of tea. Yet tea arrived in…

Few things seem as typically British as a cup of tea. Yet tea arrived in Britain relatively late, and for much of its history it was a luxury that only the wealthy could afford.

Tea first reached Britain in the middle of the seventeenth century, brought from China by European traders. It became fashionable at court after 1662, when the Portuguese princess Catherine of Braganza married King Charles II. She had grown up drinking tea, and her habit was soon copied by the aristocracy.

For more than a century, however, tea remained expensive, mainly because of very high taxes. By the 1780s, the tax on tea was well over one hundred percent of its value. The result was a huge illegal trade. Smugglers brought tea secretly into the country, and it has been estimated that more tea entered Britain illegally than legally. Some dishonest traders even mixed real tea with dried leaves from other plants to increase their profits.

The situation changed dramatically in 1784, when the government cut the tax to just 12.5 percent. Smuggling became unprofitable almost overnight, and tea quickly became affordable for ordinary people. By the nineteenth century, it had become the national drink, consumed by rich and poor alike.

At that time, almost all tea still came from China, which made the British nervous about relying on a single supplier. In the 1830s, British planters began to grow tea in Assam, in north-east India, using a type of tea plant that grew naturally there. Plantations later spread to other parts of India and to Sri Lanka, and these regions eventually replaced China as Britain's main source of tea.

The nineteenth century also gave Britain one of its best-known traditions. In the 1840s, Anna, Duchess of Bedford, is said to have started taking tea and cakes in the late afternoon to fill the long gap between lunch and dinner. Her friends soon joined her, and "afternoon tea" became a fashionable social occasion.

Today, it is often said that people in Britain drink around a hundred million cups of tea every day, most of them made with tea bags rather than loose leaves. The drink that once belonged to princesses has become part of everyday life.