The credit for creating India's vast tea empire goes to the British, who discovered tea in India and cultivated and consumed it in enormous quantities between the early 1800s and India's independence from Great Britain in 1947. Around 1774, Warren Hastings sent a selection of China seeds to George Bogle, the then British emissary in Bhutan, for planting. But nothing seems to have come of this experiment. In 1776, Sir Joseph Banks, the great English botanist, was asked to prepare a series of notes - and it was his recommendation that tea cultivation be undertaken in India.