By far the best world building I've ever come across (in any language) is from Yue Guan's historical novels; with "Jinyi Yexing" (锦衣夜行) as perhaps the best example. These books just do a ton in the way of explaining so many aspects of life and times during the eras they depicted. It can be as broad in subject as culture, geography, language, peoples, and governments and as specific details about particular laws, how the people react to these laws, how they are enforced, and why they were created in the first place. The amount of detail found within is just so enormous that there's no way any writer can invent fictional settings that come close. Hell, I've never seen anything close in English-language historical novels.