Chinese Characters Showing as Boxes or Garbled Text in Windows 10’s Built-in Ubuntu Subsystem (WSL)

In Windows 10’s Ubuntu subsystem (WSL), if Chinese characters appear as boxes or garbled text, you usually need to check two things at the same time: whether the system locale is set to Chinese UTF-8, and whether a usable Chinese font is installed in the terminal environment.

1. Modify the locale configuration

Edit /etc/default/locale:

sudo vim /etc/default/locale

Set or add the following content:

LANG=zh_CN.UTF-8
LANGUAGE="zh_CN:zh"

After saving, you can reopen the WSL terminal, or run the following command to make the current shell reload the environment variables:

source /etc/default/locale

You can also check the current locale with this command:

locale

If LANG is shown as zh_CN.UTF-8, the configuration has taken effect.

2. Install Chinese fonts

Install the WenQuanYi Micro Hei font:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install ttf-wqy-microhei

After installation, restart the WSL terminal and check whether Chinese text is displayed normally again.

3. If boxes are still displayed

If the locale and fonts inside WSL have both been configured, but the Windows terminal window still displays boxes, you need to check the font used by the terminal program itself. In Windows Terminal, ConHost, or another terminal emulator, change the font to one that supports Chinese, such as Microsoft YaHei, SimSun, Sarasa Mono SC, or another installed Chinese font.

Reference:

https://blog.csdn.net/sethqqq/article/details/77017759

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