I like medieval stuff but I've nearly learned everything I care about in Europe. I want to get started on China, but I don't have the cultural background to dive in to anything detailed, I'd just get lost in a sea of missing context.
This is exactly what pop historians are for, but 80% of them just make shit up, so I need a recommendation.
The romance of the three kingdom should be a good start, since seem like that part history is the most mainstream one. Next is the warring state era and first emperor of China
I only know about the three kingdoms through memes and games. How much of it is actual history and how much of it is myth ? There are a lot of adaptations of it and some of them seem to be pretty free form.
It is almost entirely exaggeration. However, with much of the existing known history from that era being fairly mundane annals and otherwise recorded in an un-noteworthy fashion, the Romance of the Three Kingdoms mythos is the leading historical mythos for 'China as a state'. With Confucianism, Buddhism, and Daoism being more of a set of beliefs and practices rather than a specific liturgical canon (and incredibly varied and distributed at that) alongside other historical folk diety worship, the Romance of the Three Kingdoms is basically the Chinese version of the Bible a.k.a. 'the kinda-sorta history book whose characters and stories everybody constantly references all the time'.
Actual Chinese history and archaeology of the era is quite complex as well, but it's these dramatizations that make up a large bulk of older pop historiography and are good to know for that alone.
Depends of which one. The one we know about is the Romance of the three kingdom, which is a highly dramatized version of the annals (anal xd) of the three kingdoms