Unicode literals and byte string interpretation.

[Fletcher Johnson]

If I create a new Unicode object u'\x82\xb1\x82\xea\x82\xcd' how does
this creation process interpret the bytes in the byte string? Does it
assume the string represents a utf-16 encoding, at utf-8 encoding,
etc...?

For reference the string is これは in the 'shift-jis' encoding.