I'm going to post this in case anyone comes across this problem. The quest in China where you are to get the axe, well, I know I did the quest right because I had done it many times before, but this time the axe was not there. I have the EA debugger activated in my game-via Awesome mod- and I went into buymode to see if it was missing. It was there in buymode, so I left without doing anything. When I went into live mode, the axe was there and I was able to complete the quest. I guess going into buymode reset the axe. I thought this might be helpful to someone.
Thank you. Unfortunately for me, it did not work out. Pangu's axe was not there for my sim, so I went into buy mode and sure enough saw Pangu's axe, but when I went back into live mode, Pangu's axe was still invisible. I will hold onto my hope that in my sims will be able to complete the Pangu's Axe quest in the future. I've been researching everywhere I can think of for a solution to this very frustrating problem of my sims not being able to complete the Pangu's Axe quest. I've even lost sleep over this. I made the mistake of following somebody's advice (on another forum), which was to reset the tombs by deleting the vacation save files in documents and I stupidly did not put a backup copy of my 6-month old neighborhood on my desktop. To make a long story short, deleting the vacation files ruined my 6-month old neighborhood and caused my game to CTD. I uninstalled and reinstalled WA and I am starting all over again on a fresh neighborhood. I have not got the courage yet to retry the Pangu's Axe quest in my new neighboorhood. In my game, it seems that only one sim in the whole neighborhood gets to complete the Pangu's Axe quest. I am very disappointed in the Wa EP. Only Awesomemod and Twallan's Supercomputer keeps me playing Sims 3.