Yes, yes, I know it's Wednesday/Thursday, but I've been out in the boondocks and just got back online. Then again, Chinese Tuesdays has always been more than a day of the week, it's a state of mind.

Anyway, here is the continuation of our early Chinese myths season, courtesy of Fuck Yeah Chinese Myths!:

We talked about Nüwa last time, so now we’re going to talk about her husband. Fu Xi (伏羲 Fúxī) was the first of the Three Sovereigns, Five Emperors (三皇五帝 sānhuáng wǔdì) who ruled during the mythical dynasty before the Xia Dynasty, on the banks of the Yellow River.

Flash fiction and drinking games – by Tom Pellman

Roll up all, the Anthill is launching a "Summer Shorts" season, with a new flash fiction story published every Sunday for the next twelve weeks. This is in partnership with Beijing Cream and their Flash Fiction for Charity competition, which is today at 2.30pm at Great Leap Brewing's original no. 6 Doujiao hutong pub.

Out of thirty submissions, five finalists were picked by the judges (of whom I was one), a winner will be decided today, and you can read those stories over at Beijing Cream in time. But there were so many other great submissions that just didn't make the final five – or did, but the writer isn't in Beijing and so can't join the event – that we've picked a further dozen to publish here.

White-fronting in Confucius’s hometown – by Brent Crane

I have a Swiss friend who says yes to everything. When anyone asks him if he wants to do something – grab a bite to eat, go jump in a creek – he almost always agrees. “Why not?” he says.

I thought of him when I agreed to a money making opportunity recently. I was visiting Qufu, a city in Shandong province known throughout China as the birthplace of Confucius, and nothing else. It is a poor and gritty third-tier city, where air pollution has stained the sky permanently grey and residents drive shabby motorbikes and half-constructed tuk-tuks through dusty streets. Without its connection to ancient Chinese history, it would be nothing more then a grey blot among grey blots.

Last week we talked about Pan Gu and how he awesomely created the world by holding up the sky for 18,000 years, and when he died his body parts became the hills and valleys.

After that came Nüwa, who is a badass female creation goddess (half human half serpent in some images) who came to earth from the heavens, and made all the animals. She did this for six days: as the legend goes, on the first day she made chickens, on the second, dogs, then sheep, pigs, cows and horses. Then on the seventh day she still felt lonely, so she created people.

AN EXCERPT FROM THE INCARNATIONS, A NOVEL BY SUSAN BARKER

Through the windscreen of his taxi, Wang has seen the city change. He has seen the wrecking balls swing, bulldozers levelling streets to rubble and dust and skyscrapers rising like bamboo after the rain. Land and planning permission is bought and sold. Property developers draw circles on maps and, in weeks, all that is circled disappears; the residents exiled to the far-flung suburbs and demolition crews moving in to clear out the rest. In the decade Wang has been a taxi driver, the city has changed radically. And as the dust of construction gusts across the city, sheet after sheet, he often wonders when it will end.