MySQL 8.0 FAQ: MySQL Chinese, Japanese, and Korean Character Sets Korea;  gb18030 ,  gb2312  or  gbk  = People’s Republic of China;  big5  = Taiwan;  sjis ,  ujis , cp932 , or  eucjpms  = Japan;  ucs2  or  utf8  = anywhere). Usually it is necessary to change only the client and connection and results settings. The  SET NAMES . statement changes all three at once. For example: Once the setting is correct, you can make it permanent by editing  my.cnf  or  my.ini . For example you might add lines looking like these: It is also possible that there are issues with the API configuration setting being used in your application; see  Why does my GUI front end or browser not display CJK characters correctly...? for more information. MySQL supports the Big5 character set which is common in Hong Kong and Taiwan (Republic of China). The MySQL  big5  character set is in reality Microsoft code page 950, which is very similar to the original  big5  character set. A feature request for adding  HKSCS  extensions has been filed. People who need this extension may find the suggested patch for Bug #13577 to be of interest. MySQL supports the  sjis ,  ujis ,  cp932 , and  eucjpms  character sets, as well as Unicode. A common need is to convert between character sets. For example, there might be a Unix server (typically with  sjis  or  ujis ) and a Windows client (typically with  cp932 ). In the following conversion table, the  ucs2  column represents the source, and the  sjis ,  cp932 , ujis , and  eucjpms  columns represent the destinations; that is, the last 4 columns provide the hexadecimal result when we use  CONVERT(ucs2)  or we assign a  ucs2  column containing the value to an  sjis ,  cp932 ,  ujis , or  eucjpms  column. SET NAMES ’big5’; [mysqld] character-set-server=big5 [client] default-character-set=big5 A.11.3. What problems should I be aware of when working with the Big5 Chinese character set? A.11.4. Why do Japanese character set conversions fail? Character Name ucs2 sjis cp932 ujis eucjpms BROKEN BAR 00A6 3F 3F 8FA2C3 3F FULLWIDTH BROKEN BAR FFE4 3F FA55 3F 8FA2 YEN SIGN 00A5 3F 3F 20 3F FULLWIDTH YEN SIGN FFE5 818F 818F A1EF 3F TILDE 007E 7E 7E 7E 7E OVERLINE 203E 3F 3F 20 3F HORIZONTAL BAR 2015 815C 815C A1BD A1BD EM DASH 2014 3F 3F 3F 3F 5261