My eye went straight to it as well but more because I had passively (embarrassingly) assumed that Plan9 didn't have non-western fonts by default. 'twas a silly thought.

http://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/4th_edition/papers/utf

At least Plan9 did something wrong. UTF8 is so superior to this silly 16bits encoding.

Yes, and that's why they (Rob Pike & ken) created UTF-8 and converted Plan9 to use it.

see http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs/utf-8-history.txt

Videos of that show on youtube are quite amusing and relaxing (goldberg machines).