Question: What century did Europeans develop a taste for tea?
About the article "Boston Tea Party", section "Tea trade to 1767".

Candidate passages:
As Europeans developed a taste for tea in the 17th century, rival companies were formed to import the product from China.
In England, Parliament gave the East India Company a monopoly on the importation of tea in 1698.
When tea became popular in the British colonies, Parliament sought to eliminate foreign competition by passing an act in 1721 that required colonists to import their tea only from Great Britain.
The East India Company did not export tea to the colonies; by law, the company was required to sell its tea wholesale at auctions in England.
British firms bought this tea and exported it to the colonies, where they resold it to merchants in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston.
Until 1767, the East India Company paid an "ad valorem" tax of about 25% on tea that it imported into Great Britain.
Parliament laid additional taxes on tea sold for consumption in Britain.
These high taxes, combined with the fact that tea imported into Holland was not taxed by the Dutch government, meant that Britons and British Americans could buy smuggled Dutch tea at much cheaper prices.
The biggest market for illicit tea was England—by the 1760s the East India Company was losing £400,000 per year to smugglers in Great Britain—but Dutch tea was also smuggled into British America in significant quantities.
In 1767, to help the East India Company compete with smuggled Dutch tea, Parliament passed the Indemnity Act, which lowered the tax on tea consumed in Great Britain, and gave the East India Company a refund of the 25% duty on tea that was re-exported to the colonies.
To help offset this loss of government revenue, Parliament also passed the Townshend Revenue Act of 1767, which levied new taxes, including one on tea, in the colonies.
Instead of solving the smuggling problem, however, the Townshend duties renewed a controversy about Parliament's right to tax the colonies.
It is not clear when the first tetsubin pots appeared in Japan, but a hypothesis is that the popularity of the tetsubin pot grew alongside sencha, a form of leaf tea.
China introduced Japan to sencha around the middle of the 17th century.
Sencha was not considered as formal as matcha, the common powdered green tea at the time.
Throughout the 18th century, people started drinking sencha as an informal setting for sharing a cup of tea with friends or family.
As more people drank sencha, the popularity of the tetsubin grew.
The tetsubin pot is most probably not an original design, but rather shaped by other pots around at the time.
The five closest relatives to the tetsubin are the tedorikama, the toyama, the mizusosogi, the dobin, and the yakkan.
The yakkan is the closest relative to the tetsubin, the main difference is that the yakkan is made from copper, whereas tetsubins are traditionally made out of iron.
Some people have wondered why the tetsubin was developed, when a perfectly usable vessel such as the yakkan would have worked.
Tea drinkers may have preferred the taste of water from an iron pot over the taste of water from a copper pot, which was what the yakkan was primarily made of.
Throughout the 18th century, tetsubin kettles became a standard household utensil for heating water to make tea with.
As the use of these pots increased, so too did the intricacy.
During the 19th century, tetsubin designs went from simple basic iron kettles, to elaborately engraved masterpieces. 
The different words for tea fall into two main groups: ""te"-derived" (Min) and ""cha"-derived" (Cantonese and Mandarin).
The words that various languages use for "tea" reveal where those nations first acquired their tea and tea culture.
Portuguese traders were the first Europeans to import the herb in large amounts.
The Portuguese borrowed their word for tea ("chá") from Cantonese in the 1550s via their trading posts in the south of China, especially Macau.
In Central Asia, Mandarin "cha" developed into Persian "chay", and this form spread with Persian trade and cultural influence.
Russia ("chai") encountered tea in Central Asia.
The Burmese word for "tea", "lahpet" (MLCTS: lak hpak, pronounced: [ləpʰɛʔ]) does not fall into either of the two main groups and may have originated independently.
The Dutch word for "tea" ("thee") comes from the Min dialect.
The Dutch may have borrowed their word for tea through trade directly from Fujian, or from Fujianese or Malay traders in Java.
From 1610 on, the Dutch played a dominant role in the early European tea trade, via the Dutch East India Company, influencing other languages to use the Dutch word for tea.
Other European languages whose words for tea derive from the Min dialect (via Dutch) include English, French ("thé"), Spanish ("té"), and German ("Tee").
The Dutch first introduced tea to England in 1644.
By the 19th century, most British tea was purchased directly from merchants in Canton, whose population uses "cha", though English never replaced its Dutch-derived Min word for tea.
At times, a "te" form will follow a "cha" form, or "vice versa", giving rise to both in one language, at times one an imported variant of the other.
In North America, the word "chai" is used to refer almost exclusively to the Indian "masala chai" (spiced tea) beverage, in contrast to tea itself.
The inverse pattern is seen in Moroccan colloquial Arabic (Darija), "shay" means "generic, or black Middle Eastern tea" whereas "tay" refers particularly to Zhejiang or Fujian green tea with fresh mint leaves.
The Moroccans are said to have acquired this taste for green tea—unique in the Arab world—after the ruler Mulay Hassan exchanged some European hostages captured by the Barbary pirates for a whole ship of Chinese tea.
See Moroccan tea culture.
The colloquial Greek word for tea is "tsáï", from Slavic "chai".
Its formal equivalent, used in earlier centuries, is "téïon", from "tê".
The Polish word for a tea-kettle is "czajnik", which could be derived directly from "chai" or from the cognate Russian word.
However, tea in Polish is "herbata", which, as well as Lithuanian "arbata", was derived from the Latin "herba thea", meaning "tea herb."
The normal word for tea in Finnish is "tee", which is a Swedish loan.
However, it is often colloquially referred to, especially in Eastern Finland and in Helsinki, as "tsai", "tsaiju", "saiju" or "saikka", which is cognate to the Russian word "chai".
The latter word refers always to black tea, while green tea is always "tee".
In Ireland, or at least in Dublin, the term "cha" is sometimes used for "tea," as is pre-vowel-shift pronunciation "tay" (from which the Irish Gaelic word "tae" is derived).
"Char" was a common slang term for tea throughout British Empire and Commonwealth military forces in the 19th and 20th centuries, crossing over into civilian usage.
The British slang word "char" for "tea" arose from its Cantonese Chinese pronunciation ""cha"" with its spelling affected by the fact that "ar" is a more common way of representing the phoneme in British English.  
Jasmine tea () is tea scented with aroma from jasmine blossoms to make a scented tea.
Typically, jasmine tea has green tea as the tea base; however, white tea and black tea are also used.
The resulting flavour of jasmine tea is subtly sweet and highly fragrant.
It is the most famous scented tea in China.
The jasmine plant is believed to have been introduced into China from Persia via India during the Han Dynasty (206 BC to 220 AD), and was being used to scent tea around the fifth century.
However, jasmine tea did not become widespread until the Qing Dynasty (1644 to 1912) when tea started to be exported in large quantities to the West.
The jasmine plant is grown at high elevations in the mountains.
Jasmine tea produced in the Chinese province of Fujian has the best reputation.
Jasmine tea is also produced in Hunan, Jiangsu, Jiangxi, Guangdong, Guangxi, and Zhejiang provinces.
Vietnam is also known for the production of jasmine tea. 
India produces and consumes more tea than any other country in the world, except for China, including the famous Assam tea and Darjeeling tea.
According to the Planning Commission Deputy Chairman, Montek Singh Ahluwalia, there are plans to officially recognise tea as the “National Drink” in 2013.
According to the ASSOCHAM report released in December, 2011, India, as the world’s largest consumer of tea uses nearly 30 per cent of the global output.
India is also the second largest producer of tea.
Despite the production, India is also the largest exporter of tea after China.
The cultivation and brewing of tea in India has a long history of applications in traditional systems of medicine and for consumption.
The practice of Ayurveda has resulted in a long standing tradition of herbal teas.
Traditional Indian kitchens have long utilised the medicinal benefits offered by various plants and spices such as basil (Tulsi), cardamom (Elaichi), pepper (Kali Mirch), liquorice (Mulethi), mint (Pudina), etc., and traditionally, teas made with these plant leaves and/or spices have been in use for centuries for maladies ranging from the serious to the trifling.
Tea is also mixed with these traditional herbs.
The taste of chai (sweet and milky) helps disguise the stronger and more bitter flavours of some of the medicinal additives, while other, more pleasant flavours such as cardamom and ginger add a pleasing flavour and aroma to the tea along with health benefits.
The consumption of tea in India was first clearly documented in the Ramayana (750-500 BC).
For the next thousand years, documentation of tea in India was lost in history.
Records re-emerge during the first century AD, with stories of the Buddhist monks Bodhidharma and Gan Lu, and their involvement with tea.
Research shows that tea is indigenous to eastern and northern India, and was cultivated and consumed there for thousands of years.
Commercial production of tea in India did not begin until the arrival of the British East India Company, at which point large tracts of land were converted for mass tea production.
Today, India is one of the largest tea producers in the world, with over 70% of the tea being consumed within India itself.
A number of renowned teas, such as Darjeeling, also grow exclusively in India.
The Indian tea industry has grown to own many global tea brands, and has evolved to one of the most technologically equipped tea industries in the world.
Tea production, certification, exportation, and all other facets of the tea trade in India is controlled by the Tea Board of India.