What was the political, symbolic, and practical importance of the Boston Tea Party?

Because colonists' boycott and smuggling of tea greatly damaged the British East India Company (a corporation that supplied tea, spices, and other goods from India and the Far East to the British Empire), Britain in 1773 passed the Tea Act, which lowered the tax on tea. Colonists sensed that this law was some sort of trap, fearing that the lower tax rate would lead colonists to purchase British tea and that the tax revenues would be used to pay for more British officials in America. They were determined to continue to stop the importation of British tea. On December 16, 1773, a band of colonists disguised as Mohawk Indians (in order to conceal their identity, and also because Indians were considered free and defiant) boarded British ships in Boston Harbor and heaved 45 tons of tea into the bay. The Boston Tea Party, as this event became known, was one of the most celebrated acts of defiance to British authority in the years before the outbreak of the American Revolution.