IT Learning Made Simple

Sep 20, 2026 · Fundamentals

How Chinese Characters Are Stored in Computers: Unicode & UTF-8 Deep Dive

This article explains how computers store Chinese characters using Unicode and UTF-8, covering the history of encoding chaos, Unicode code points, UTF-8 variable-length encoding rules, a step-by-step example of encoding '中', common mojibake causes, BOM, and programming best practices like using utf8mb4 in MySQL.