Reddit reviews The Analects of Confucius: A Philosophical Translation (Classics of Ancient China)

To get anywhere with anything Chinese, you have to read the Analects. Roger T. Ames and Henry Rosemont's translation is, in my opinion, the best. The intro is an amazing analysis of the text, its key concepts, and how crucial understanding the way Chinese language works is in order to understand Ancient Chinese thought.

Here is Ames discussing his life's work: the idea of "Confucian Role Ethics". Really cool stuff, and the intro is done by Hal Roth, who does some amazing work on Zhuangzi, and early Daoist contemplative practices.

This by Michael Puett looks at Zhuangzi in relation to Confucius, and is a bit easier to grasp than Ames' talk.

If you have audible, Grant Hardy's Great minds of the Eastern Intellectual Tradition is a killer series of concise, informative lectures about Chinese, Indian, and Japanese philosophies. I highly recommend it because he goes through each culture chronologically, so you get to see the changes in Chinese and Japanese religions/philosophies before and after the introduction of Buddhism. If you don't have audible, you can get this one pretty cheap with the free trial.

Hope this helps, and I'll add more as they occur to me.

The Analects of Confucius translated by Ames and Rosemont is a great starter for Confucian thought. Henry Rosemont is also on the forefront of a movement to create a "global ethical framework" utilizing Confucian principles. Really interesting stuff!

Fung Yu-lan's A Short History of Chinese Philosophy is another fairly easy and highly informative read for beginners in the field.

I really don't have too much experience outside of China itself, but I hope these help!

There's probably a few ways you could go about expanding your knowledge base. The two that seem most fruitful are

1. Reading for a deeper understanding of the topics that you're already familiar with.
   
   
2. Ranging more broadly into other areas that may interest you.
   
   If (1), then I'd probably suggest one of two courses. Either, (a) read the stuff that influenced the existential thinkers that you've listed, or (b) read some literature dealing with issues related to the thinkers you've listed.
   
   For (a) I'd suggest the following:
   
   

• Anything by Kant
  
• (In the case of Kierkegaard) Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit or his Aesthetics
  
• (For Nietzsche) Emerson's essays, Schopenhauer's World as Will and Representation, or Spinoza's Ethics
  
• Maybe some Freud for the later thinkers? Civilization and its Discontents is really good.
  
  For (b) it's really a mixed bag. I'd suggest going through the SEP articles on the thinkers you've listed and looking into some good secondary literature on them. If you're super interested in Nietzsche, I'd definitely suggest reading Leiter's Nietzsche on Morality. I really couldn't tell you more unless you told me something more specific about your interests.
  
  If (2), then I suppose I'd suggest one of the following:
  
  
• Readings in Classical Chinese Philosophy for a good, broad introduction to Chinese Thought
  
• The Analects of Confucius. This translation is excellent
  
• A Short History of Chinese Philosophy
  
• Heidegger's Being and Time
  
• Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception
  
• Some of Rilke's work
  
• Unamuno's Tragic Sense of Life
  
  Again, it's hard to give you better directions without more information on what you're actually interested in. I've just thrown a bunch of stuff at you, and you couldn't possibly be expected to read, say, Schopenhauer's World as Will and Representation over break and be expected to really understand it.