China

China is probably the oldest semi-continual polity in the world that anyone actually gives a shit about. Over the course of twelve major dynasties, a shitload of smaller ones, a bunch of big civil war punch-ups, one Communist dictatorship, and its current, ongoing, post-Communist oligarchy, this long strip of west Asian coast and assorted inlands has had a tremendous, outsized effect on the world economy and the culture of surrounding nations.

Naturally, this has made it fertile fodder for tabletop gaming. From the Forgotten Realms to Golarion, few are the fantasy gaming settings without a "medieval China"-equivalent somewhere in the world. However, quite often, these Sure-Fine brand not!Chinas are about as well-researched and accurate as, well, their European counterparts, taking the broad cultural outline of a big empire ruled by a centralized bureaucracy and an all-powerful Emperor (who may or may not be a god / demigod) and a few specific trappings of architecture and dress to make what amounts to a China-based theme park for the adventurers to roam around in, seeing the sites, taking pictures, and fighting their way through that bestiary full of East-Asian monsters you never get to use.

There's nothing wrong with this, really, but there's nothing particularly interesting about it either beyond the novelty of playing a bunch of slack-jawed tourists in your adventuring campaign.

However, the other major influence China has had on tabletop gaming is through the medium of wuxia.

Wuxia

"'Wu' means martial arts, which signifies action, 'Xia' conveys chivalry. Wuxia. Say it gently... 'whooshah'... and it's like a breath of serenity embracing you. Say it with force, 'WuSHA!', and you can feel its power."

— Samuel L. Jackson, "The Art of Action: Martial Arts in the Movies"

Thank you, Reverend Jackson.

Wuxia is what China has instead of Tolkien. Just as the Western fantasy setting has got your dwarves and your elves and your dark lords leading armies to conquer the world, China has Jianghu, the Land of Rivers and Lakes, where corrupt civil authority forces noble wandering heroes to live like outlaws as they fight to restore order, learn secret techniques from old masters, are forced to battle their former best friends, etc. Just like Western fantasy, there's a lot of high-brow, literary stuff, but there's also a lot of entertaining trash pumped out to fill a public appetite for it. For instance, those cheap Shaw Bros. kung fu movies are wuxia, but so are films like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Hero.

And, naturally, this genre has its own tabletop games.

The biggest success is probably Exalted, White Wolf's epic fantasy role-playing game. While there are, obviously, a shitload of other influences, from a corrupt cosmic bureaucracy and physical Realm in need of heroes to fix things to the super-martial arts and flowery naming conventions, Creation would simply not be recognizable without the trappings of wuxia. This is true even in a subtler sense: wuxia often focuses on tragedy and deeply-flawed heroes whose best intentions turn on them. Thanks to the Great Curse, all the exalts are, unless they do their utmost to defy their fates, doomed to destroy all they love.

Other games, like Legends of the Wulin and Feng Shui draw on the genre more overtly. Even if the latter is more about aping the whole spectrum of Hong Kong cinema than wuxia specifically, even the later "heroic bloodshed" films are basically wuxia pictures set in the modern day with guns instead of swords, cities instead of forests, and cops and triads instead of heroes and bandits. The "69 A.D." Juncture is pure wuxia though, with an Imperial Court strangled by the machinations of the evil eunuch-sorcerers known as the Eaters of the Lotus and a countryside lousy with their supernatural and mortal henchmen terrorizing the nation. And the text notes that the heroic Dragons are frequently destroyed and remade, heroes born beneath stars of tragedy who often go out fighting the good fight.

Wizards actually tried their own hand at a wuxia setting, the awesomely-named Dragon Fist. Running on an early, jury-rigged d20 engine with a lot of leftover AD&D parts, it was barely-functional, but fun as hell, and set in the land of Tlanguo, though it got no support at all after the initial release. (Boooo!)

Legend of the Five Rings is usually seen as a more "Japanese" setting than a Chinese one, and it's true that there's plenty of jidei geki DNA in Rokugani society, from its strict, stratified class system and militarism to its overtly-Japanese names and weapons, to subtle things like "void" replacing "metal" as one of the Five Elements. But, there's still plenty of Chinese flavor there. Various periods in Rokugani history were far more friendly to the wuxia mien, with bands of heroic ronin fighting the power against a corrupt shogunate in the hands of the Shadowlands. In particular, the Phoenix Clan endorses a philosophy that has far more similarities to daoism than anything recognizably Japanese, and Rokugan itself, as a land-bound empire that relies on a coastal breadbasket to feed a less-productive inland and a Great Wall along a border with a dangerous and barbaric foreign power to keep the heartland safe, is much more like China than any period in Japanese history.

History

A brief timeline:

• Pre-History Stuff: The aboriginal Chinese are displaced by what will later be known as the "Han." Confusingly, a dynasty of the same name is also coming up. The Han built one of the first civilizations on Earth, with writing, metalworking, and advanced farming techniques.
• Shang: According to their own traditions, they took over for an even-earlier dynasty called the Xia, but we know fuck all about them. Anyway, the Shang had bronze, which made them the meanest bitches on the block for a long time militarily, and they were obsessed with divination, going through huge heaps of bones and turtle shells for fortune-telling purposes whenever anyone did anything. Eventually, they became lazy and corrupt, before being overthrown by...
• Zhou: The Zhou were a family from out in the boonies that moved onto Shang land and became vassals to the Shang. When they overthrew the Shang, they introduced the concept of a "Mandate of Heaven," issued by the cosmic forces of rightness. It was brilliant, in its own way: theoretically, each dynasty ruled by the Mandate. When they didn't do so well or justly, Heaven would withdraw the Mandate and give it to someone else who'd overthrow them. More-cynically, this meant that a successful rebellion was "proof" that Heaven had turned its back on the old order, and an unsuccessful one was "proof" that it wasn't time yet. Anyway, the Zhou had a good run, but the state's vassals started pulling apart, and eventually the whole thing fractured into a mess of warring states fighting for supremacy. This was the time period of the "Hundred Schools," and the origin of both Confucianism and daoism in some of their earliest forms.
• Qin: Probably the shortest dynasty that people actually remember and care about, but it had the great emperor Qin Shi Huangdi, and he was emperor enough for an entire family line of most lesser dynasties. Uniting the nation by military force, the so-called "First Emperor" invented probably the first modern nation-state, standardizing culture, weights, measures, roads, and countless other things to ensure that the Chinese stopped thinking of themselves as being from Lu, Jin, or Wei and started thinking of themselves as Chinese. He's got a bad reputation as a crazed mass-murderer too, but that was mostly because he made enemies with the Confucians and the Confucians wrote the history books for two millenia and some change to come. What he built barely survived him, but there's a reason the modern nation still bears his name. (...It's pronounced "chin." Goddamn pinyin.)
• Han: This one's so important it's still what the Chinese call themselves as an ethnic group. Roughly contemporaneous with the Roman Empire, with each being aware of the other without ever quite meeting. They seemed to think of themselves as opposite versions of themselves on opposite ends of the world. Introduced the concept of a centralized bureaucracy offering positions to applicants who took exams based on the Confucian classics and a new coinage standard, the latter of which would survive until the Tang and the former of which didn't go away until the Emperor did. A hugely-prosperous, technologically-skilled, highly-advanced society, that, unfortunately, as part of a running theme, began to fall into weakness and decadence. First, the eunuchs, always resentful of their snipping, tried seizing power for themselves, only for military officers to storm the capital and slaughter them all, leading first to a tenuous military dictatorship, and then to, well...
• Three Kingdoms, and the Romancing Thereoff: The late Han dynasty and generation shortly thereafter was a great and heroic age. It was a time of larger-than-life personalities, brave generals, brilliant strategists, and masterful politicians. It was the second-bloodiest period in human history, eclipsed only by World War II, and it didn't even have machine guns. (Did have the repeater crossbow though.) It is worthy of study both for historical / entertainment value and for inspiration in any good tabletop campaign that wants to have a military-political element. And it is the subject of one of the Four Classical Novels, the historical epic usually called "The Romance of the Three Kingdoms" in English. Unfortunately, it is also bastard complicated, so let's just say that one of the Three Kingdoms finally usurped the Han after using them as a puppet state for a while, and then conquered the others a generation later. But that dynasty was short-lived, tyrannical, and spectacularly-incompetent, leading to a hundred years of civil war that, while not nearly as interesting, was certainly a lot quieter and less-bloody. Most gamers in the west know this period due to the Dynasty Warriors series.
• Sui: The good: they reunited a divided China, and undertook such vast projects as the Grand Canal connecting the city of Beijing in the north to the city of Hangzhou in the south, a thousand miles away. The bad: they were extravagant assholes and control freaks whose projects were built on a foundation of peasant bones mortared with blood. Fell apart after a scant few emperors once repeated attempts to conquer Korea against dogged resistance and interference from the top broke the back of the army.
• Tang: The Emperor Li Yuan, who liberated the capitol from the Sui, is his dynasty in microcosm. When he took power, the people thought he would be the greatest emperor in their nation's history; energetic, brilliant, skilled at all manner of government, military, and artistic tasks. He restored the Confucians and brought about one of the most prosperous, cosmopolitan periods in his people's history. Then he turned into a paranoid, murderous asshole as he got older until he finally got deposed. Sounds about right. This is the age in which the Chinese invented gunpowder, and, at its height, it was also the richest, most-advanced, most-cosmopolitan society on Earth. Once things started falling apart, the Neo-Confucians, a radical sect of Confucianism that is going to make trouble for most of the rest of this section, began taking power, and attempting to purge China of "outside influences," including Christianity and Buddhism. Buddhism survived, Christianity did not.

Culture

There's a lot of it, and it's surprisingly relevant.

In Western antiquity, there were supposedly four "classical elements," namely air, fire, water, and earth. You know this. Don't pretend you don't, it's in fucking everything. But, in classical China, there were five: fire, water, earth, wood, and metal. And, just as all of Europe copied the Greeks, all of Asia copied China, with varying degrees of fidelity. Japan, for instance, had void instead of metal and air instead of wood. This more-or-less introduced the idea of "opposing" elements and elemental weaknesses, via a complex web of interactions. Think how boring and tactically-flat so many games would be if certain kinds of damage didn't work better on certain enemies!

Many games play with this alternate elemental system. Aside from Legend of the Five Rings, Pathfinder and the Dresden Files RPG both offer variant rules using it instead of the classics. It certainly makes for an interesting change.

Meanwhile, let's talk about religion. While Christianity has its own traditions of warrior-monks, usually represented as clerics or paladins, the Chinese tradition is arguably the most distinctive. Two of the three major Chinese religions/philosophies, taoism and buddhism, emphasize meditation and discipline, which is strenuous to both the body and mind. Thus, they invented systems of exercises to strengthen both, called "kung fu," or, literally, "hard work."

Then, when they needed to act as local militias defending against marauding bandits, it turned out having intense mental focus and physical stamina made them damn good fighters, and the rest is history. And that, ladies and gentlemen is where the modern D&D monk came from.

In particular, taoist practices emphasize the existence of a kind of underlying substance of which everything is made, called qi. Qi is a kind of... energy field, created by all living things. It surrounds us and penetrates us; it binds you get where this joke is going, right? Anyway, in Exalted, qi and essence are almost literally the same thing, and the monk and its various similar classes in D&D have "ki pools" that offer fancy new abilities.

Anyway, the Chinese also envisioned Heaven as containing a system, a Celestial Bureaucracy mirroring the one on Earth, that kept the world running according to various agreements and contracts between the gods. Most tabletop settings have similar rules, regulations, and restrictions on the gods to explain why they subcontract out to adventurers, and though most of the gods and personalities of, say, the average D&D campaign setting have more to do with Western paganism than anything recognizably Chinese, the system of how they operate is more Chinese than Western simply because they can't just do as they please.