Tea hit Britain in the 1660s and became an obsession. By 1800, the British were drinking over a billion cups a year. Every cup came from one place: China, which had a near-monopoly on tea cultivation. China wanted silver in return. Britain's silver reserves bled east for decades.

The East India Company looked for something — anything — that China would accept in trade. They tried cotton, wool, clocks. Nothing stuck. Then they found opium, grown cheaply in British-controlled India. By the 1830s, China had millions of opium addicts and Britain had solved its silver problem.

China tried to ban the drug. In 1839, the imperial commissioner in Canton seized and burned 20,000 chests of British opium. Britain declared war. The First Opium War ended with China ceding Hong Kong, opening five ports to foreign trade, and paying reparations. A second war followed in 1856 with similar results.

Meanwhile, Britain was planning an escape from tea dependence entirely. Botanist Robert Fortune disguised himself as a Chinese merchant and smuggled 20,000 tea plants out of China into British India. Within two decades, Assam and Darjeeling were producing enough tea that British demand could be met without trading with China at all. The Chinese monopoly broke.

Tea is now produced in over 30 countries. The British tea ritual survived its colonial origins and became shorthand for politeness. The opium crisis ended long ago.

But the two Opium Wars reshaped East Asia for over a century. Hong Kong stayed British until 1997. The 'century of humiliation' is still central to modern Chinese political identity.

All because the British couldn't stop drinking tea.