China
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When people say Asia, the first thing that would pop in their heads is China (Much to the other Asians dismay). China as we all know, is one of the Oldest As Fuck Civilizations that is still flexing their Geopolitical muscles, with a history that spends over 5000 years and is still kicking. How old are they? they were already making high city walls and Empires when the Glorious Romans were still living in mud huts, yeah that fucking old. Only the likes of the Egyptian Dynasties, Mesopotamia, Babylonian Empire, India and other early Middle-Eastern/Euro-African Empires rivaled or surpasses it in sheer age and unlike China, they are all dead. Furthermore, unlike most civilizations which had one Golden Age in its lifetime, China had Three Golden Ages. However unlike the others listed (With the exception of India) who unfortunately suffered the common symptoms of civilization heart attacks, coronary barbarian infections or outright absorptions, China and to some extent India manage to survive by sheer isolation. China is also known for their Celestial Dragon Emprahs, multiple imperial Dynasties, overpoweringly influential, being too unusually advance for their age for nearly 2000 years, "Four Great Inventions" (Compass, Gunpowder, Paper and Printing), Confucius, martial arts, Chinese New Year and now recently Communists or manufacturing everything you buy in very, very poor quality.
To give you a clue on how Egoistical China was, check a look on the list of the amount of honorifics they get, yes even the fucking nicknames of China make the British "Empire where the Sun never Set" look amateur in comparison. These honorifics are....
- Middle Kingdom
- Celestial Empire/Kingdom
- Heavenly Empire/Kingdom
- Center Kingdom
- Universal Civilization
- Land of the Heavenly, Celestial...(Pick the name of whichever Chinese Dynasty here)
- Empire of the Great Ming
- Empire of the Great Qing
- Great Chinese Empire
- Sleeping Giant of Asia
- Sleeping Dragon of Asia
- Land of the Dragon Emperor
- The Roman Empire of the East
- Cradle of Civilization of the East
And my personal favorite....
- The Empire so damn rich and wealthy, that even with all the treaties it had to pay in the 19th century, it still had a GDP twice that of the entire US economy today
History of China Part 1: The Ancient Times
As we all know, China has a lot of historical content, so we tried our best to fit all the important bits and peaces in a small and condensed paragraph.
Prehistory
Leving aside some Homo erectus, Modern Humans first showed up in East Asia about 75,000 years ago. For at least 20,000 people in China were making pottery. About 7,000 BCE some chinese farmers worked out how to grow millet and we have the rise and fall of a bunch of regional cultures to which we know little, but we do know that they worked out glazed ceramics, how to make silk, some systems of markings which might have been forms of writing and by 3,000 BCE they could work bronze.
Xia Dynasty: Fake or Real?
According to a few ancient accounts of note (among them being those cited by Confucius), there was a great kingdom ruled by a Dynasty founded by a King named Yu the Engineer from about 2100 BCE to 1600 BCE, which the Shang overthrew. The problem being that these accounts were written at least centuries after it fell. Its not in dispute that some form of comparatively complex agrarian civilization existed in China at that time, there is no hard evidence that said culture or cultures added up to something to the effect of the Dynasty described.
Shang Dynsaty
In the Shang Dynasty we begin to get written accounts about how things operated and we see something to the effect of Chinese writing emerging written on cattle bones. The Shang Dynasty was a theocracy in which a central priest king who ruled by burning bones and making predictions based on how they cracked. Weird as this is, the Shang managed to make a bunch of other clans of people their vassals and get taxes out of them and this set up lasted for more than 500 years.
Even so it eventually fell. The last king of Shang was by all accounts a sadistic tyrant and an enormous asshole - taxes were raised to build him new palaces and pleasure domes, which he'd fill with lakes of wine and trees hung full of meat and had people frolic in while he watched; when he got tired of that he started inventing new ways of burning people to death. This didn't endear him to his people or his vassals, one of whom was the king of this podunk kingdom called the Zhou - the fact that the king of Shang also killed and fed him his son that one time didn't help. So eventually the Zhou went all Last Alliance on the Shang and took over.
Of course, do note that most of what was passed down about the Shang dynasty (that wasn't confirmed by modern archaeological findings) was about how awful their last king was, and remember the Zhou had to justify their uprising somehow, so take the above paragraph with a bit of salt.
Zhou Dynasty
Zhou was originally a smaller kingdom that bordered the Shang kingdom in Western China and eventually managed to take it over in 1046 BCE. When they did the Zhou King Wu came up with the justification for their takeover: Heaven had given the Shang Kings a mandate to rule, but because they had become corrupt and debased they had taken that Mandate away and have given it to the Zhou Dynasty. The idea stuck and the Zhou conquerors gained influence. At the same time agriculture improved, the population expanded and things were alright, for couple of centuries at least.
Spring and Autumn Rapefest
After King Wu took over, he worked out a feudal system for china and put his relatives and generals in charge of various fiefs. The problem was that he gave them too much power and the central Zhou government gradually became irrelevant. The various fiefs built up their own armies, treated the King's orders as suggestions and eventually began fighting with each other over territory, which would just get worse and worse. Eventually smaller fiefdoms were eaten up by larger ones. At this point, people in china started working iron and building crossbows, which helped make these battles get even bloodier.
Among the people who took notice this bloodshed, as well as rampant corruption was a tax collector who would become known in the west as Confucius. His philosophies based around his ideas about humans should interact (tl,dr version: Subordinates should be loyal and respect their superiors, superiors have an obligation to be supportive to his subordinate and together both should work to be good people and create a nice harmonious society where shit gets done) would latter become the official ideology for china for years to come. Also, this period produced Sun Tsu and his book The Art of War.
Warring States Period of Bloodbath
The difference between the warring states period and the Spring and Autumn period was the fact that during the Spring and Autumn Period still pretended at times that the Zhou government was actually running things when it served its purposes. In the warring states they stopped playing that game and simply acted as independent states and (as the name suggests) fought with each other all the time. Wars in this period involved tens of thousands of peasant conscripts clad in scale armor (either wood or metal) armed with crossbows, halberds, pikes and short swords fighting in formations commanded by nobles on chariots, who also acted as bow armed cavalrymen.
Some of these states funded their armies by taking some of the silk that they made and selling it to people going west. These guys would again sell it to guys going further west, and so on and so on until the silk reached Persia and Greece and was insanely expensive. It also caused a trade imbalance bad enough to cause many roman politicians to advocating a ban on silk altogether.
History of China Part 2: Too Many Fucking Dynasties
Though the Zhou were a memory, their idea of the Mandate of Heaven would live on and would be used again and again. According to the narrative one ruling household and their officials would become complacent and corrupt so Heaven would show its disapproval with things like famines (IE farmland was not properly managed and emergency granneries set up in case of crop failure were not kept topped up), banditry (peasants who were starving due to said famines began to steal stuff to survive) and barbarian raids (soldiers who would have been guarding the boarders are re-assigned to deal with the bandits or, annoyed that their paychecks have not arrived in six months, bugger off and either go home or join with the bandits), so some rebels and a a charismatic general or local official comes in and defeats the Imperial Armies. Since he deposed of the guys to which Heaven had gotten mad at, it was clear that they lost it and had given it to the victor since he was the victor and all. In time, things go down hill again and the cycle continues.
Qin Dynasty: First EMPRAH!
One of those Warring States in the Warring States period was Qin. Eventually it became ruled by a guy called King Zheng, an exceptional statesman and military leader. Under his rule and using Legalist philosophy he re-worked his society into a machine for total war. He raised a vast army which instead of being led by nobles who got their position due to birth, it's officers were promoted from the ranks(Field promotion was determined by how many enemy ears a soldier brought back from the battlefield. Seriously.) Power was centralized and one gained positions of power by exceptional service to the Qin state. By 221 BCE, all the other warring states had been crushed ruthlessly. He then proceeded to introduce a single system of writing and spread his centralized bureaucratic system across all the states he had conquered. As a finishing touch, he decided that "King" was not an adequate title for describing the greatness of his achievements, so he invented "Huangdi", which in English roughly means "EMPRAH". Thus, Qin Shi Huangdi became China's first Emperor. Word of his conquests managed to work its way along the Silk Road and eventually made its way to Rome, where "Qin" was corrupted to "Sina", which two thousand years latter would become in English word China.
The big problem was that while he was an effective ruler (at least until he went crazy from eating too much jade and drinking mercury to try to become immortal), he was also a brutal one. People who were not drafted into the army were drafted into building roads, the beginnings of the Great Wall and eventually his tomb with it's terracotta army. Defiance was dealt with swiftly and brutally with a whole bunch of executions. This did not endear him to the people and after he died, China has one of its first peasant rebellions. According to one story, the thing that got the ball of Rebellion going was some conscripts getting delayed by bad weather and given the choice between arriving late and being executed or rebellion and possibly surviving, they rebelled. That rebellion didn't work, but it did inspire the nobility of many ex-Warring States to rise up as well and those eventually did in the dynasty in 206BCE. For its achievements, it lasted only 15 years.
Han Dynasty: AKA The First Golden Age of China
Fortunately for the Chinese, things did not go back into Warring States period after the Qin were overthrown. Liu Bang managed to unite the peoples that Qin had conquered and formed the Han Dynasty. Some attempts were made to re-establish the feudal arrangement of the Zhou dynasty, but several rebellions later the Han Emperors decided to stick with the Qin's centralized bureaucratic government, which China would use for the next few thousand years, though with an established nobility. It was the first time that Confucianism was adopted as an official ideology, though some Legalist ideas were kept. For four centuries society prospered and advanced. Paper, Porcelain, waterwheels and fairly advanced mathematics (including negative numbers) were developed. Due to the prosperity, the Han Dynasty would then become the name of the largest ethnic group in China, the Han Chinese. There was also a obsession among the rich to try to mix up potions of immortality out of minerals and plants. Usually their efforts only yielded potions of mortality, though this will continue and be of some importance latter on. At this time, Buddhism began to enter China.
There was also the 14-year Xin Interregnum right in the middle, but nobody counts that as a proper dynasty.
Three Kingdoms: The Breakup
But like all good things the Han Dynasty eventually came to an end. Around 180 CE The central government weakened and a few civil wars caused the local officials to build up their armies for defense. Eventually the Prime Minister Cao Cao decided to re-unite China while being very brutal in doing so, but he was eventually defeated at the battle of Red Cliffs.
From 220 to 280 there were three states, Wei in the north, Shu in the southwest and Wu in the southeast which fought like a bag of cats to reclaim the Imperial throne. Even so, technology marched on with guys like Ma Jun and Zhuge Liang inventing repeating crossbows and compasses and so forth. Wei eventually conquered Shu, but Wei eventually fell to an new upstart called the Jin rose up, conquered Wei and eventually conquered Wu.
This period is the setting of "Romance of the Three Kingdoms", one of the most important bits of classical Chinese literature.
It was during the Wei that China would have its first proper diplomatic contact with these curiously short people from islands even further east. It would be the beginning of a long and troubled relationship.
Jin Dynasty
After both the Wei and Wu fell against the new upstart state, the leader of the new state, called Sima Yan established the Jin Dynasty and renamed himself as Emperor Wu of Jin, reuniting China once again. Unfortunately the unity lasted less then a decade and sooner enough, the Dynasty suffered a devastating civil war in which it could not contain the revolts of numerous nomadic tribes such as the Wu Hu. In 311, the capitol of Jin, Luoyang was captured along with Emperor Huai; for the rebels, it was considered as a, "two for the price of one". After this incident, the remnants of the Jin court fled to the east and reestablished the government at Jiankang, in which a certain prince in the Imperial court proclaimed the Emperor Yuan of the Eastern Jin dynasty. Unfortunately the newly settled Jin would be plagued by constant rebellions, and after several usurpers and assassinations later, the last Emperor of Jin, Emperor Gong would later then abdicate the throne in 420, ending the Jin and splitting China into two seperate Dynasties.
Southern and Northern Dynasties
The Jin Dynasty eventually broke into two states in 420, one in the north and one of the south. Unlike the Three Kingdoms, these kingdoms went through several short lived Dynasties. The South had the Liu Song, Southern Qi, Liang and Chen. The North had the Northern Wei, Eastern Wei, Western Wei, Northern Qi and Northern Zhou.
The Northern Dynasties were largely founded by steppe nomads who took advantage of the weakness of the Jin to launch their own barbarian migrations as their western cousins did to Rome. They would be the first of the many "invader dynasties" that would seize Northern (and sometimes all of) China in history to come, but it also showed the assimilating power of Chinese culture when all these barbarian armies promptly adopted Chinese-style dynasties and set up Chinese-style civil bureaucracies as soon as they took over, and eventually woke up one day realizing that they had their own barbarian invaders from the north to deal with and were basically the Chinese now.
On the other hand, the Southern Dynasties were largely Han, and populated and developed by loads of Han refugees resettling from the and liking their new home. They were short-lived and tumultuous and had the lion's share of eccentric and incompetent Emperors, but the fact that the Yellow and Yangtze Rivers proved a formidable natural obstacle to Northern invaders provided some security. Combined with the fact that Southern China was actually a pretty nice place to live compared to the cold and dry plains of the North, art and culture flourished. All those ink landscape paintings were developed during this time. Confucian scholars messed around with Taoist philosophy and alchemy, made their own hippiehermit communes to contemplate the cosmos and personal growth, and yes, took lots of drugs. This couldn't last and didn't last, and eventually the future Sui Dynasty swept from the North and conquered the South, unifying China again.
Sui Dynasty: The Rather Short-Lived One
China was reunified under the banner of Sui. The Sui Dynasty was basically Qin Dynasty 2.0 minus the mercury guzzling, they were effective administrators, but were also pretty brutal and warlike. Among the accomplishments of the Sui Dynasty was the construction of the Great Canal, a 1776 kilometer artificial waterway running north to south which is still in use today, the re-centralization of power and the creation of the Imperial Examinations. Rather than having hereditary nobles running stuff, every year there would be examinations where people had to write essays based on Confucian moral philosophy. The guy who wrote the best essay out of a five hundred guys got a diploma and could take a position in the Imperial Bureaucracy. Never the less, they wasted a bunch of resources trying to take over Korea, which soon led to their end.
Tang Dynasty: The Second Golden Age of China
Fortunately the Sui Dynasty was quickly replaced by the nicer Tang Dynasty, which was on the whole a lot more stable and less heavy handed while retaining the governmental advancements. For nearly three centuries there was peace and prosperity. The Imperial Capital of Chang'an achieved a population of a million citizens. It expanded it's borders to the west, had a major influence on Japan and got actively involved in maritime trade going from China to the Middle East and East Africa aided by the introduction of compasses. While the older land routes of the silk road could send things like China to Europe, an ox could only carry a few hundred kilograms, they moved slowly and stopped at night and most importantly it involved a whole lot of middle men charging markup each time. Ships could carry more goods quicker with less manhandling and go all the way. This dynasty also had China's only regent Empress. The Tang also became tradebros with the Arabs who were having their own golden age, and religious tolerance, artistic development and Buddhism were all at all times-highs. Influence from Arabic fashions would also produce some of the most scandalously revealing period dress in Chinese history - see Curse of the Golden Flower.
Sometime around the 800s some alchemists who had been futzing about in their search for immortality discovered that a mixture of potassium nitrate, sulfur and carbon together you could make something which burred very intensely over a short period of time.
Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms: The Clusterfuck Age
After a period of famine, a guy named Huang Chao managed to muster up a rebellion and attempted to take over. He did manage to sack the Chang'an, but he did not manage to take over. The Tang Dynasty collapsed shortly after that, so china got fifty more years of division and warfare as a bunch of generals carved out their own kingdoms.
Liao Dynasty
Song Dynasty: The Third Golden Age of China
Yuan Dynasty: Only Time Mongolia was Relevant in Chinese History
Ming Dynasty: The Era where the entire Indian and West-Pacific Ocean was Dominated by China
Qing Dynasty: The Last One and End of an Era, also Manchu Pigtails
As most games with Chinese influence focus on the Imperial age of China, this history must break off here. If you want to learn more, Wikipedia is the other way.
Chinese Analogues in Fantasy
Due to its exoticism and age, there are a couple of Chinese inspired Empires in Fantasy.
- Eldar - Despite having weapons like Shuriken Catapults and Celtic names, the Eldar is actually more Chinese inspired. Examples include the cultural and historical arrogance, being incredibly advance for their era, martial arts, phoenix and dragon worshiping, being fantastic racists to everyone else and the obvious Yin-Yang symbols in some of the Eldar artworks.
- Cathay - Based on the old name for China, this is deliberate and perfect example.
- Dynasty Warriors - A series of Video Games based solely on the Chinese mythology and legends, expect a lot oversexualised women since the games was created in Japan.
- Jade Dynasty - similar to Dynasty Warriors, but in MMO style.
- Easterlings - The Movies depicted them as Persians with Chinese influence, while GW based most of their models on Samurais.