Most internationalization advice assumes text is a bag of words separated by spaces. Chinese breaks that assumption at every layer of the stack, and if your product's core value depends on reasoning about individual characters — not just displaying them — you end up rewriting infrastructure you assumed was solved.
I spend most of my time on a system that analyzes Chinese characters for naming: stroke counts, five-element (五行) classification, tone patterns, and sourcing candidate characters from classical poetry corpora. Here's what actually bit us.
A "Character" Is Not a Character
The first thing that breaks is len().
name = "𠮷田" # note: the rare variant of 吉, U+20BB7
