I Read Books: Under Heaven
Guy Gavriel Kay takes the Tang dynasty and specifically the events leading up to the An Lushan rebellion as his inspiration here. Shen Tai, son of a general, has spent the mandated two years mourning for his father on the borders of the Kitan Empire, burying the dead of one of his battles, and laying to rest the wailing ghosts. Then, nearing the end of the time, people start to arrive; first from the Taguran queen, a daughter of the Kitan emperor, gifting him two hundred and fifty Sardian horses, the finest in the world, unavailable in Kitai. Then a friend, and with the friend an assassin.
He travels to the capital, meeting various people, seeing various strange things, at each stage finding himself more and more entangled in court plotting. But in the end it is another plot, one that by family ties he is not quite separate from, that overwhelms the Empire.
Kay has a good grasp on what makes the Tang period specifically itself (tea, for instance, is new and sophisticated in the north). And when he pushes things into legend or magic, it makes it more itself, becoming a story of the history as might be told by story-tellers. This is then undercut by the end in which various characters scatter and don’t quite get to the endings they seemed destined for.
Read This: For an excellent, slightly formally mannered, fantasy about China
Don’t Read This: If you want to actually know about China*
* Kay helpfully gives a bibliography in the acknowledgements
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