… as default latin1 with collation as latin1_swedish_ci.. But as I had to add new field to the system to show Chinese info to employees …UTF-8, collation UTF9_general_ci 2.> keep all English columns as latin1 with collation as latin1_swedish_ci and chinese colums as as UTF-8, collation UTF9_general_ci…

… as latin1_swedish_ci, but all the strings fields actually contain valid UTF-8. Is there a way to convert the table definition to utf-8 without it trying to transcode the strings, which are already in the correct encoding? Converting the utf-8 to latin1_swedish_ci…