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By the 1600’s, Chinese tea was being exported to Russia, then Western Europe. The Dutch East India Company was the first vehicle for this trade, followed closely by the British East India Company. Both of these firms spurred the rapid growth in tea consumption by westerners by establishing their own tea plantations in India, Indonesia, and Ceylon – simultaneously increasing both the supply of and demand for the leaf. Tea was sold to Westerners through the already–established coffee houses of London and Paris and other major European cities. Tea quickly supplanted coffee as the beverage of choice, and began making its way across the sea to the European colonies abroad. By 1690, tea was being sold to the American colonists in Boston. Americans quickly became avid tea-drinkers, with higher per capita consumption rates than their British counterparts. Ironically, Boston also became the site of the end of the American love-affair with tea when the colonists dumped an entire tea-shipment into the harbor in 1773 – an act with repercussions that precipitated the Revolutionary War with Great Britain just 2 years later.