"there must be more than 255 Chinese characters"

Not quite sure what you mean by that. There are thousands of Chinese characters. You need to know at least 6000 just to read a newspaper.

Not sure how many bytes one character would take up. It might be variable depending on the complexity of the character.

My husband has done some small work using Chinese characters in word processing type documents. I know there are some conversion programs available that allow you to see something other than ascii gibberish. There is also an internet forum of Chinese language scholars. If either sounds like that is what you are looking for, let me know.

Marie