Chinese mythology is as varied and multi-levelled as the country from which it springs. China contains many different cultural groupings, who speak a number of different languages. However, it has had a literate cultural élite for thousands of years, and myths which were originally regional have spread by means of a pictographic script which transcended language barriers. Their evolution has not been entirely oral.
Much Chinese mythology is based on animism, which sees the land itself as alive. It contains many therianthropic creatures, who are both animal and human, and demonstrates the playfulness of the gods.
Strands of Chinese belief

Chinese mythology has been influenced by a fear of outsiders. It has also been shaped, sometimes deliberately, by religious faiths and philosophies. Some myths even demonstrate the conflict between them, as in the story of the Monkey King, which reflects the conflict between Ta ... Read more »

The vanishing hitchhiker of Deer Lake


Those of you who grew up in Deer Lake may be familiar with a spooky story involving the old spillway bridge. The bridge in question is just after the power house in Deer Lake, just before a little place that is called Spillway.
Several years ago there was a tale floating around Deer Lake which said that if you went driving in the night in that direction, you would sometimes see a hitchhiker.
This hitchhiker always took the form of a woman in a white dress, hitching for a ride to Corner Brook. If you stopped to pick her up and drove over to the side of the road, the woman would never be there. The puzzled driver would carry on and would not see the woman again.
If, poor soul, you did not stop to pick the woman up, an even more puzzling thing was said to happen.
Those who carried on down the road without her would often turn their head to look into the mirror to see the woma ... Read more »

The Mekong River Basin is defined by the land area surrounding all the streams and rivers that flow into the Mekong River. This includes parts of China, Myanmar and Viet Nam, nearly one third of Thailand and most of Cambodia and Lao PDR. With a total land area of 795 000 square kilometres, the Mekong River Basin is nearly the size of France and Germany together. From its headwaters thousands of metres high on the Tibetan Plateau, it flows through six distinct geographical regions, each with characteristic features of elevation, topography and land cover. It would take 2 days of twenty-four hour driving at 100 km per hour to drive the same distance as the length of the Mekong River (4800 km). The most abundant resources in the Mekong Basin are water and biodiversity. Only the Amazon River Basin has greater diversity of plant and animal life. So much water flows into the mainstream Mekong from the surrounding basin area that, on averag ... Read more »

Ho Chi Minh’s diary in the prison.

His poems from prison

Poem 1.