Making a society based on Feudal China

[Blackhawk748]

And im looking for a good place to start, as the bulk of my knowledge comes from Journey to the West (the movies) and other movies (mostly general Kung Fu flicks, though i did watch Red Cliff). So i know what it looks like, i just don't know most of the particulars, particularly when it comes to government.

[Vitruviansquid]

You mean like the Zhou dynasty? The Warring States period? The Qin dynasty (was that feudal?)?

Here are a few possibilities you might go for if you are vaguely aware that you want a primitive China setting:

Spring and Autumn Period - China is split into multiple small kingdoms engaging in constant warfare. Each ruler is desperately searching for the "secret sauce" that will make their kingdom the strongest, and they regularly court and are courted by scholars, philosophers, and magicians who all claim to know how one kingdom can gain an edge on another. This is the time when Confucius lived, Lao Tze reputedly lived, and their philosophies were competing with Mohism, Legalism, and I would imagine a hundred other smaller philosophies.

Qin Dynasty - The leading philsophy of the day is Legalism, which basically means the State will very straightforwardly tell you what the laws are, and since you know the laws and you know you are not supposed to break them, the punishments for breaking the law are extremely severe. In the popular imagination today, this makes the Qin empire a fairly horrifying police state - where peasants will go poor from overtaxation or bad harvests or corrupt officials ruling over them, and then have their hands cut off for stealing food to survive. The army is a pack of wolves and tigers - fanatically loyal to their commanders and emperors, they live under iron discipline and have a twisted meritocracy where promotion was gained based on the number of enemies' heads they took. All power and splendor was concentrated at the top.

[Blackhawk748]

You mean like the Zhou dynasty? The Warring States period? The Qin dynasty (was that feudal?)?

Uh, you know, looking at their timeline, 'feudal' is probably a lousy description. When i think of Feudal China i seem to be thinking of some time between the Warring States Period and the Ming Dynasty, which is a stupidly huge amount of time.

So lets shrink it down to The Warring States to The Three Kingdoms period, which shrinks us from 2000 years to only 800 or so, far more manageable

[Floret]

Since you have listed only Journey to the West, I thought I'd do so for the other 3 great classics:
Romance of the three kingdoms; Dream of the Red Chamber; and The Water Margin - all three novels, alongside Journey to the West that are considered very highly in China itself, and all set (roghly) in a time period useful for Classic Fantasy settings.

Of those three, I can really recommend The Water Margin for a look on Chinese Perspectives in heroes and ((parts of) Confucian) morality. (And somehow, Cannibalism. The book is weird sometimes.) It also provides quite a lot on Legal systems.

[Herobizkit]

If you're more of a visual person, there's been a "historical simulation" series of games based on the Romance of the Three Kingdoms. There's, like, 13 of them, the newest available on PS4 and Steam.

I cut my teeth on Ro3K II on the SNES back in the day and learned quite a bit about the theming of ancient Feudal China through it.

[Brother Oni]

The two novels (Romance of the Three Kingdoms and The Water Margin) I'd recommend have already been mentioned.

Moving more into the visual and pop culture side of things:

Warring States (just prior to the Qin unification): the manga Kingdom is entertaining, although still fairly accessible and a bit light on the culture.

Three Kingdoms - you've mentioned Red Cliffs, which is based on the Battle of Chi Bi.
Koei pretty much owns the video game franchise on the Three Kingdoms period, from the Romance of the Three Kingdoms simulation style games, to the horde slash-em-up Dynasty Warriors. Of the Dynasty Warriors franchise I've played, I'd recommend 7 as it deviates the least from the actual history and also includes the end of the Three Kingdoms era.

If you're aiming for something more fantasy based, the movie Hero with Jet Li is a retelling of a story from the Qin Dynasty and the final scene is an example of how Legalism goes all the way to the top.
Aside from Journey to the West, A Chinese Ghost Story and Encounters of the Spooky Kind give a fairly good grounding of what supernatural critters are about and their abilities, although the aesthetics are from much later (both are from about the Qing Dynasty).

Pretty much everything else I can think of falls outside your requested time period (The Shaolin Temple with Jet Li again is set between the Sui and Tang Dynasty, The Curse of the Golden Flower is even later and Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon is later still).

[Knaight]

There's been a lot of emphasis in the thread thus far on stories about military conflict, and while that can easily get across a Chinese feel there's other things that will as well. There's the constant cultural tensions between northern and southern China (from the differences in climate and staple food that shape a lot of society to the tendency for coalitions of regional aristocratic families to squabble for power, to how the differences in terrain led to a frequent northern-southern military split during periods of disunity where the regional cultures drifted apart), there's the emergence of a centralized bureaucracy fairly early on, there's the imperial examination system and system of rotating posts that characterized that centralized bureaucracy and that provided a fairly high degree of cultural unity during more centralized periods and that mitigated the emergence of regional power structures in the aristocracy, there's the penchant for large scale engineering works that produced both wonders such as the Great Wall and less highlighted but probably more important basic infrastructure including one of the most extensive canal systems in the world), etc. In particular there's the general class of the scholar-official, which was really emphasized and is fairly distinct from a lot of systems of nobility.

I'll also point out that a lot of the movies are pretty bad representations of what China looked like, as there's a habit of taking Qing China, removing a few objects of Qing material culture that are really blatant (e.g. potatoes), and then just calling it a day for something that is set hundreds or thousands of years earlier.

[Blackhawk748]

Huh, never realized Hero was set so early. Thanks for all the advice so far

[Brother Oni]

Huh, never realized Hero was set so early. Thanks for all the advice so far

It depends on the translation. The version I had was more literal and less poetic than the Western release and didn't take liberties (eg the whole Tianxia/Our Land debacle). It's also somewhat obfuscated that the King of Qin joined up pre-existing walls to create the Great Wall, rather than being solely responsible.

I'm told there's a number of authentic details in the movie; for example near the very start of the film there's two court musicians tapping away on hanging metal panels which is apparently period music.

There's a number of things that post date your time period that would make for an excellent campaign set up - for example the Chinese warrior-scholar knight errant equivalent (youxia) and the jianghu sub-culture.

Another cultural factor that needs to be at least acknowledged is the melting pot of religions and cultures that China was. The story of the Monkey King, Sun Wukong, neatly encapsulates it - an animist monkey spirit, taught martial arts and magic by a Taoist master, fights Chinese folk gods before a mountain is dropped on him by the Buddha.

[Anonymouswizard]

The Warring States period has it's own game, Qin: the Warring States. It's not the best game in the world, but that's because more effort seems to have gone into 'realistic fantasy China' than 'game balance'. The English publisher recently decided not to continue, so it might be hard to find at the moment, but it could be worth a read.

The same company also does a historical fantasy Norsemen game and a historical Celtish King Arthur game (and I believe a futuristic Japanese horror game), with the same case of 'rules approximately okay, really good research'. However they're French and no longer licenced, no clue on how long until the French company tries to bring them over again.

[Knaight]

The Warring States period has it's own game, Qin: the Warring States. It's not the best game in the world, but that's because more effort seems to have gone into 'realistic fantasy China' than 'game balance'. The English publisher recently decided not to continue, so it might be hard to find at the moment, but it could be worth a read.

It is a pretty cool game in a lot of ways though, and given the forum we're on it's probably at least as balanced as the systems the OP is used to.

[Anonymouswizard]

It is a pretty cool game in a lot of ways though, and given the forum we're on it's probably at least as balanced as the systems the OP is used to.

Oh, I adore Le Septième Cercle's games, and they're generally better balanced than D&D, I was just noting that as game balance wasn't the priority there might be some choices which are just better (the Tao of Yin and Yang IIRC). I think they're one of my favourite RPG companies, along with Cubicle 7 who just gave up the licence for their games (apparently to focus on Warhammer, they seem to collect British properties).

Qin is one of my favourite games for managing to combine 'relatively low power' with 'awesome', plus the neat Yin-Yang dice mechanic. I certainly prefer it to Legends of the Wulin. The stats are also pretty nice, it's fairly obvious when you're going to be using each.

[wolflance]

Only tangentially related, but here's something I came across at 4chan that I find interesting:

Spoiler

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[Brother Oni]

Only tangentially related, but here's something I came across at 4chan that I find interesting:

Spoiler

Show

Very nice find! There's about enough information there to set up a decent campaign with a reasonable amount of verisimilitude.

A little expansion on the hair cutting bit - intentionally cutting someone's hair instead of going for a lethal strike is offensive as it's demeaning (you're not taking them seriously) and goes against Confucian values. The ancient Chinese didn't cut their hair as your body was regarded as a gift from your parents and cutting parts off was deemed disrespectful towards them.
There's an example of this from RotTK by Xiahou Dun, where he takes an arrow to the eye and rather than throw the eye away, he swallows it instead, gaining much prestige and face.

Speaking of which, 'face' is a very tricky to explain cultural concept, hence the 4 whole posts dedicated to it and I still don't think that quite covers all the nuances. The soundbite explanation is that it's a cross between prestige/respectability/social standing, but with a unique Chinese twist. An example is in the film Fong Sai Yuk, where the new magistrate/cop forestalls a fight between Sai Yuk and the local gang by saying "This is my first day here, give me some face."
As mentioned in the posts, this is only really applicable in peace time or 'civilised' countries. Face wouldn't get you anything from an enemy commander, nor would it work in one of the many 'barbarian' tribes around during the time period in question. As mentioned, it does become increasingly more important the higher the layer from base you get.

[daniel_ream]

If you're aiming for something more fantasy based, the movie Hero with Jet Li is a retelling of a story from the Qin Dynasty and the final scene is an example of how Legalism goes all the way to the top.

Something to keep in mind about the recent crop of Chinese movies (anything post-Hong Kong reunification) is that the Chinese government uses them as propaganda to push their preferred vision for the country (he who controls the past, etc.)

The central theme of Hero is that even if the Emperor is a tyrant and a horrible person who killed lots of people and oppressed the citizenry, he unified China and brought peace to the land and made the trains run on time. So it would be wrong to take just revenge upon him.

If all you're looking for is visual flavour and general ideas, it doesn't matter, but keep in mind if you're looking at deeper themes and social structures. What you're seeing is China as the current government wants you to see it, not as it actually was.

[Mechalich]

I'll also point out that a lot of the movies are pretty bad representations of what China looked like, as there's a habit of taking Qing China, removing a few objects of Qing material culture that are really blatant (e.g. potatoes), and then just calling it a day for something that is set hundreds or thousands of years earlier.

This is an important point. Various media - including the classical novels such as RoTK tends to portray Chinese antiquity as much, much more technological advanced than it was, usually displaying something of Ming or Qing vintage in terms of armor, weapons, structures, and even less obvious things like stirrups - totally present in Red Cliff even though they weren't invented for hundreds of years to come.

For game purposes, unless you want to engage in some really heavy scholarship you're actually better going somewhat later. The Ming period is much better documented than earlier periods and much like the High Middle Ages does for D&D will allow you to model based off what shows up in media without too much modification.

However, the most important consideration for centering a game in faux-China is a simple question: is the empire presently united or divided? The types of stories that are told when there is an acknowledged emperor and the state is functioning more or less as intended are usually very different from those that are told when the state is divided.

[Brother Oni]

The central theme of Hero is that even if the Emperor is a tyrant and a horrible person who killed lots of people and oppressed the citizenry, he unified China and brought peace to the land and made the trains run on time. So it would be wrong to take just revenge upon him.

I took away the central theme as 'the end justifies the means'. Sure he was regarded as a tyrant, but he believed that the moral calculus indicated that the death toll from unifying the land would be less than the overall death toll from allowing the incessant warfare of the Warring States period to continue.

Whether that's revisionist history and getting into the Chinese government using such films as propaganda runs foul of the board rules, but I will point out that the whole 'Our land' translation issue from the original tianxia (天下) was due to the Miramax translation for the US market.

[wolflance]

This is an important point. Various media - including the classical novels such as RoTK tends to portray Chinese antiquity as much, much more technological advanced than it was, usually displaying something of Ming or Qing vintage in terms of armor, weapons, structures, and even less obvious things like stirrups - totally present in Red Cliff even though they weren't invented for hundreds of years to come.

For game purposes, unless you want to engage in some really heavy scholarship you're actually better going somewhat later. The Ming period is much better documented than earlier periods and much like the High Middle Ages does for D&D will allow you to model based off what shows up in media without too much modification.

However, the most important consideration for centering a game in faux-China is a simple question: is the empire presently united or divided? The types of stories that are told when there is an acknowledged emperor and the state is functioning more or less as intended are usually very different from those that are told when the state is divided.

Ironically older, 1970~80s Chinese movies tend to have very historically accurate depiction of costume/armor/material culture - horse with no stirrup, accurate costume and furniture, bonze is proper gold-colored instead of rust green etc. Some even borrowed actual artifacts from the Museum for movie shooting.

It was Hong Kong's investment/involvement in Chinese movie industry that turn the scene into the mess with swarms of cheap plastic props that it become today.