A question for the SQL experts.

I have a website that is using English and Chinese languages.

The store name and store owner appear as html codes that represent Chinese characters - for example the first character of the store name is stored as &#32654. this is OK for browsers but creates problems with emails:-

1. The "from" address on the email displays as &# codes and not the Chinese equivalent.

2. We cannot allow customers to select text format for emails, only HTML, as the content of the email gets displayed as HTML codes.

The configuration table actually contains the HTML codes. However, the store address and phone number field is OK and holds the Chinese characters correctly

Is this an encoding problem?