A pessimistic man once said “all good things must end.” In China that tends to happen even more quickly. Today will be my last day writing Daily Tea Leaves, or my first writing “China Expat Blog”. Sadly I am leaving China Expat, and we have also decided to re-name the blog in order to make its connection to the magazine and website clearer.

Working at China Expat was a tremendous experience that I would never give up. The team here has been great, and together we have completely re-designed the website and magazine layout. Today, all of our archives are accessible in HTML format, and all issues as PDFs. Our forums have had strong success, and we recently added the Ski Forum where you can ask our experts about the Chinese scene. It’s only the beginning of November, but as things get colder you should definitely check in more frequently before you head to the slopes.

For me Daily Tea Leaves was one of the most fun parts of the job. The first few months it was slightly directionless, but in June things started to take hold. Ironically the thing that helped us take off the most quickly was discovering a website stealing virtually all of our articles and using them without accreditation. (When they realized what one of their staff members had done they were profusely apologetic and have made very nice gestures to us). At the time we were correctly outraged, but the truth is that we never could have gotten NBC, Businessweek, or most of the China blogs to mention us at that point without the story.

Since then I hope that I’ve found a voice, and that someone out there has enjoyed what I have had to say, be it confrontational, or light-hearted.

On Monday China Expat’s new managing editor, Ernie Diaz, will officially christen the newly dubbed China Expat Blog with his own unique brand of writing. Ernie comes to us from one of Beijing’s oldest English magazines, Metropolis, with an excellent reputation. I’m sure you will greatly enjoy reading his regular commentary. Please keep an eye out for that. I may stop in from time to time, and you can also hear what I have to say on my newly formed personal blog Cup of Cha.

Since the beauty of blogging is that I can say whatever I am going to take a moment to thank everyone I have worked with at China Expat. It is a tremendous team, and I sincerely think we have made great progress together. At the very top of that list is Chris Devonshire-Ellis who has listened to my opinions, good and bad, and never tried to stop me from testing an idea I thought would be interesting. He sent me all over the country in search of interesting stories, and I can only hope that I used his trust (and resources) in productive and creative ways.

Thank you for inviting me into your lives, and hopefully I occasionally provided a bit of entertainment, and maybe even an insight or two (well, entertainment anyway). So I bid you goodbye, but not farewell forever. For now, the final leaf has fallen.