This cup and saucer has transfer-printed decoration. This new technique revolutionised ceramic production in Britain. It allowed factories to reproduce high-quality decoration at very little cost once the copper transfer-printing plates had been engraved. The transfer-prints here show an elegant couple taking hot drinks from tea wares of the type made at Worcester. The factory's porcelain recipe included soaprock, which made its porcelain resistant to the shock of boiling water and therefore suitable for tea and coffee wares. People generally drank from handle-less tea bowls like this one during the early 1700s, but British factories were making teacups with handles by the 1740s.