You had `latin1` somewhere. See https://stackoverflow.com/a/38363567/1766831 . Do... * the `SELECT HEX ...` to see whether you have the correct utf8 encoding: `E28099`. * `SHOW CREATE TABLE` to see what `CHARACTER SET` that column has. * `SHOW VARIABLES LIKE 'char%';` to see what the connection is like. Read about Mojibake.