Loading multibyte data from Amazon S3 - Amazon Redshift
Services or capabilities described in Amazon Web Services documentation might vary by Region. To see the differences applicable to the China Regions, see Getting Started with Amazon Web Services in China (PDF).

Loading multibyte data from Amazon S3

If your data includes non-ASCII multibyte characters (such as Chinese or Cyrillic characters), you must load the data to VARCHAR columns. The VARCHAR data type supports four-byte UTF-8 characters, but the CHAR data type only accepts single-byte ASCII characters. You cannot load five-byte or longer characters into Amazon Redshift tables. For more information about CHAR and VARCHAR, see Data types.

To check which encoding an input file uses, use the Linux file command: 

$ file ordersdata.txt
ordersdata.txt: ASCII English text
$ file uni_ordersdata.dat
uni_ordersdata.dat: UTF-8 Unicode text