There's a few layers this can fail at. You are right that you need the character encoding filter. Do you know if the data is being stored/inserted correctly at the DB level? (ie- connect to MySQL using some other tool to see). MySQL allows you to specify the character encoding at a DB-wide level or on a per-table level. When I create tables manually I always specify "DEFAULT CHARACTER SET UTF8;" explicitly, in the name of paranoia, but you can also use "default-character-set=utf8" in the my.ini config file. This is handy if seam-gen is generating your schema for you, which I guess is probably the case. If everything is OK at the DB level, then I'm not sure.. View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4047430#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...