curses and unicode

[Gandalf]

  Hi All!

I have to write an application that can display Chinese charaters in 
text mode under unix. I found several text mode console programs (like 
zhcon and big5d).
They are able to use English and Chinese characters at the same time, in 
text mode. (In fact, they are using graphics, but they emulate a 
standard terminal.)
Do somebody know how can I display chinese characters from curses (using 
one of these console programs)? I'm sure it can be done. For example,
midnight commander or lynx can do this:

http://zhcon.sourceforge.net/images/scr_mc.gif

But I do not know how to do this from Python. I only have the curses 
module and the addstr method. The addstr method does not support unicode.
Should I send a special character sequence with addstr? I'm totally 
lost. I tried to read the documentation of zhcon but it is in Chinese 
which I
do not understand. :-( Please help me.

   G