I'm just watching the 2002 movie "Hero", which is set in the period just before the unification of China under the Qin Emperor, and have also seen similar films such as "The House of Flying Daggers" (Tang Dynasty) and "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" (Qing Dynasty).

In those movies, the royal/imperial palaces and persons of ancient China are portrayed as almost impossibly opulent and powerful with spotless palaces covered top to bottom in lacquer, jade and gold, thousands of identically dressed servants and identically uniformed soldiers.

The Wuxia genre of film is intentionally stylised and full of exaggeration - every swordfight features insane feats of wire work, characters literally fly through treetops or across lakes and so on. So how much of the opulence depicted there is wild fairytale exaggeration and what do we know about what it was really like?

I appreciate by the way that those three films are set in wildly differing time periods - "Crouching Tiger" is specifically identified as 1779, "Flying Daggers" in 859 and "Hero" sometime in the 200s BC, and I guess I'm more interested in the earlier dates but really anything you can tell me will be of interest as I know literally nothing of Chinese history before the Boxer Rebellion...

Also, while I'm on the subject, is there a good "Basics of Chinese history for Dummies" out there anywhere? Books, Videos, Podcasts, whatever...