I think the title basically explains what I'm trying to do but here is a little more detail. I'm trying to send it through the URL to my php page as a get query. Here is my test case of a single character encoded: ä½ = %E4%BD%A0 Now this works fine on Google, which I've noticed sends URL encoded Chinese through it's URL based search string. But it doesn't work on my site so I'm guessing either apache isn't setup properly or I need a newer version of Apache. I know Google uses Apache Tomcat, so perhaps that supports big5 encodings and auto detection of character sets or something and my version of Apache doesn't? My Apache version is 1.3.3.7. Here is what Apache is sending to my PHP page: ä½ Now clearly that is an encoding issue, so how do i fix it? I read somewhere that Big5 is an encoding type that deals with Chinese characters, would I need to use that to interpret the URL and how do i set that in Apache? I know I can do AddDefaultCharset command but I think thats only for content as that doesn't seem to do anything. I've tried AddDefaultCharset Big5 but it didn't fix it.