Chinese characters may appear on Web pages as images (gif or jpeg) or special character sets. When they appear as special character sets you must have those fonts downloaded to your computer for them to display. The language and character set names will appear under Character Set or Encoding in the View menu your browser even though the fonts have not been downloaded. See an example page with the Traditional Chinese Big5 character set.

Chinese characters may also be activated by other tags such as HTML, P and FONT. In this case and when there is no META tag in the header, you have to select the character set from the menu bar View > Encoding/Character Set

The character for "East" ,ªF, should appear as if you select Big 5/Traditional Chinese in the View > Encoding/Character Set menu and have the Big5 character set installed.

Viewing Chinese Character Sets in Netscape and Internet Explorer

View Menu Encoding			Font files
Language	Ex. East	Where used	Character Set	Download	Font Name
Chinese Traditional		Taiwan, HongKong etc.	Big5	ie3lpktw.exe	MingLiU
			EUC-TW
			UTF-8 *		MingLiU
Chinese Simplified		China mainland, Singapore and Malaysia	GB2312	ie3lpkcn.exe	MS Song
			GBK/GBX		MS Hei
			UTF-8 *		MS Song

Display Chinese Character Sets in your browser

Written Chinese

Examples for East Graphical Char		Hex Coded Char Only 1 will be correct. Change w/ View > Encoding/Char. Set
		Big5	GB	UTF-8	Pinyin
Traditional		ªF		æ±	dong1
Hex Code		\xAA\x46		\xE6\xB1
Simplified			¶«		dong1
	Hex Code		\xB6\xAB

Spoken Chinese
Although the written languages started with basically the same characters (even though they have evolved differently over time), pronunciations for the same character is different for: Mandarin (pinyin), Cantonese, Taiwanese, Mandarin, Xiang, Gan, Hakka, Wu, Fujianese, and Cantonese groups. Dialects of the Mandarin group are spoken in three-quarters of the country by roughly two-thirds of the population, which is one of the reasons why Mandarin was chosen as the national language. Cantonese is the main dialect of Guangdong Province, Hong Kong, and many overseas Chinese communities. The major dialects spoken in Taiwan are Southern Fujianese or Taiwanese and Hakka, spoken by 75 percent and 15 percent of the natives respectively. Mandarin is the primary language used in schools, government, and most business offices....
Mandarin is the de-facto standard spoken language.
See Also: Chinese Language at Taiwan Govt. Info. Office.

References:
Fonts at WorldLanguage.com
Displaying Chinese On a Macintosh
Displaying Chinese On the Web
Reading Chinese in the Internet
Displaying Chinese Text
Unicode
Learning Chinese Reference List
Pinyin Luc Devroye's Chinese Font page
Displaing Foreign Languages

Chinese Dictionaries
Dictionaries at: Chinese-English Online Dictionary, Chinese Char. & Culture, Chinese Encyclopedia, Yahoo, Mandarin Tools, Sun Rain

Chinese writing software

Chinese Pronunciations

Other Language Codes

Terms

CJK (Chinese/Japanese/Korean)
GB (GuoBiao) - Character Set used for Simplified Characters
HZ - a 7-bit data format proposed for arbitrarily mixed GB and ASCII text file exchange.
Big5 - Character Set used for Traditional Characters
EUC - Extended UNIX Code
UTF - Universal Transformation Format - A method for converting 16-bit Unicode
      characters into 7- or 8-bit characters
ISO-2022-CN - yet another new standard being quietly developed by
            Chinese software engineers in China and Taiwan