opening utf-8 files - chinese mb characters

Hello everybody, I am having some trouble with utf-8 encoding. The html file containes chinese characters and looks ok, when opened in a browser. Now I want to extract some text from the file. In order to do this I do: $handle = fopen($file, "r"); $contents = fread($handle, filesize($file)); echo $contents; The chinese characters are gone by then. They show up as questinomarks or wired characters. To fix it I tried to add: $contents = utf8_decode($contents); header("Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8"); But still... no luck :-( Has somebody an idea why?? Regards, Merlin