Blog encoding imploded (again)

Blah blah and blah. Movable Type required that I upgrade my database schema to the new "4.0026" version, and caused something to go awry with my mt database character encodings. I am not too sure what the original encoding was, but I think it was latin1, even if unicode characters were present all over (I clearly do not understand the logic behind these things). After the blowup, all my "é" (French e acute) became "é", and the Chinese characters in my entries were transformed into gibberish.

After a fix that emerge out of magical incantations, at least the French accents work again, but I'll need to obtain a clean backup to figure out if it really did. The trick was to make my database latin1 again (I made it utf8, thinking that a consistent encoding environment would solve things), while keeping the tables in utf8. Chinese characters still don't appear at certain places, seemingly those after one or two other Chinese characters. Strange... Of course, I'll need to know more about how characters are managed. It seems like it's a seasonal thing to struggle with.