How To: show Chinese characters on WordPress

laelene Post in how to guides，Tags: how tos, technology, tutorials

16 April 2021

Now that I’m reviewing Chinese dramas, I wanted to be able to type Chinese characters into my blog posts, but they were all coming out as question marks when I saved! 真烦人！

I did some research and got some confusing answers before finally getting it to work, so I wanted to log that in case you have trouble too. Ultimately it was the answer to this thread that helped me decipher what I needed to do. Below are step by step instructions following that answer.

I logged in to my webhost provider and thankfully they had quick and easy links, so I clicked on “phpMyAdmin”

That landed me on this page:

I thought I’d fiddle around with the Server Connection Collation dropdown and change it to one targeted for Simplified Chinese, but that didn’t seem to do anything. Instead I chose my site from the selection on the left panel, then clicked on the SQL tab:

Then in the box, I pasted the code from the help topic:

alter table wp_posts convert to character set utf8 collate utf8_general_ci;
alter table wp_links convert to character set utf8 collate utf8_general_ci;
alter table wp_comments convert to character set utf8 collate utf8_general_ci;
alter table wp_terms convert to character set utf8 collate utf8_general_ci;

After I clicked “Go” I got some green messages confirming the changes and then that SQL box was blank again. That was it! Once I returned to my blog and added Chinese characters, now they display correctly and don’t get reverted to a mess of ??????s lol.