I hope someone can help me... the problem is really hair-raising for me as a newbie =)

I have been using phpbb since 2 years back and at that time it was 2.0.4 and the mysql version was 4.0.x. I didn't set anything in particular with respect to encoding and everyone could post double-byte characters very well (both trad chinese and japanese in particular, which I suspect most probably was in BIG-5 encoding and may or may not be Shift-JIS).


After a recent HDD crash I had to reinstall everything and opted for the new 4.1 version of mysql, but now there is 'proper support' for unicode and hence many settings.

I did set using my.ini the default encoding to be UTF-8, and also the tables I use are already in UTF-8 (utf8_general_ci) encoding. However:

1) when I post chinese through iso-western (english interface of phpbb), and review it through phpmyadmin, the post's characters are in the form &#12345, which function-wise is hanging in there because IE and Firefox displays correctly.

2) when I post chinese through BIG-5 (chinese interface of phpbb), the chinese text just disappears into thin air (without any error messages), so I get a totally blank entry in the database.


So...
How do I tell mysql to save whatever that comes along in the form UTF-8 compatible encoding, or am I going the wrong way? Thank so much in advance......