Today Newby Teas is a highly successful specialty tea company with offices in eastern and western Europe, Russia, Asia, and the Middle East; and in August 2016 launched in the United States. In 1995, with some of the wealth he had accrued over the years, Sethia established the N Sethia Foundation, a UK-registered charity that supports medical research, youth activities, and disaster-relief management.
The foundation charitable trust owns The Chitra Collection, and although the extraordinary pieces are privately held in vaults, individual items from the carefully curated shelves have already appeared at public events and exhibitions. In 2015 at the National Museum of Kazakhstan in Astana, the Ministry of Culture and Sports of the Republic of Kazakhstan and the N Sethia Foundation organised an exhibition titled “Tea, Art and History.” A selection of 98 items from the collection, which included teapots, teacups, bowls, samovars, and tea caddies, were on show for three months and attracted 400,000 visitors from all over the world. And in London in September 2016, pieces from the collection were on display at the LAPADA Art & Antiques Fair in an exhibition designed around four themes: “Tea in Early China and Japan,” “Tea Comes to Europe,” “Tea and Empire,” and “Global Tea Culture.” The LAPADA event demonstrated how individual pieces from the Chitra Collection can trace the history of tea trading and drinking and tell the stories behind these beautiful silver, porcelain, and pottery tea wares.
