> Common local encodings like Big5 (also 16-bit fixwidth) was already suffering from serious lack of code points at that time. They are not 16 bits wide, but m

> Common local encodings like Big5 (also 16-bit fixwidth) was already suffering from serious lack of code points at that time. They are not 16 bits wide, but mostly 14 bits wide and separated from the single byte portion with most significant bits of bytes set. As far as I can tell there are "only" about 33,000 code points [1] in the Unihan database that are known to be officially encoded in some sort of encodings throughout the entire East Asia. This does not include unofficial but de facto encodings like ETEN extensions to Big5 but you get the idea. This and the Han unification made it pretty reasonable to expect that the modern characters can be encoded in 16 bits. [1] I've counted distinct code points in the "other mappings" table from the Unihan database.