Maybe do a little test first: Create a simple test.php in your root folder and add some Unicode text there. Then check if this page loads correctly. This way you can verify that your webserver is sending the correct Content-Type header.
As i said in the cookbook there are many places that all need to use UTF-8. If only one of them uses the wrong encoding, it will not work. So check and verify these step by step.
sorry for that trouble, actually I was constantly receiving a db error from yii, and I refreshed the page several times to ensure that the question is posted,