Korean characters not displaying when pulled from MS Access database using php

I have an Access DB which contains a load of people with Korean names. I hava a classic asp site (which i inherited) that reads data from the DB quite happily and displays it properly. I am now developing a different site in php, but it is unable to display korean characters at all. I have written two very simple scripts, one in asp and one in php to work out why.

ASP:

<%

Response.CodePage = 65001



Set objLoginConn = Server.CreateObject("ADODB.Connection")

objLoginConn.Provider = "Microsoft.Jet.OLEDB.4.0"

objLoginConn.Open "C:\wwwroot\mydb.mdb"

Set rs = Server.CreateObject("ADODB.Recordset")



SQL = "SELECT firstname FROM mytable"

rs.Open SQL, objLoginConn, 3, 3



while not rs.EOF

    response.write("<p>"& rs.fields("firstname").value &"</p>")

    rs.movenext

wend

%>

PHP:

<?php

$con = new COM("ADODB.Connection") or die("Cannot start ADO");

$con->Open("Provider=Microsoft.Jet.OLEDB.4.0; Data Source = mydb.mdb");



$SQL = "SELECT firstname FROM mytable";

$rs = $con->execute($SQL);



while (!$rs->EOF) {

    echo "<p>".$rs->Fields("firstname")->value."</p>";

    $rs->movenext();

}

?>

the ASP script prints all the names correctly and the php script prints a load of ?'s. If i remove the Response.CodePage = 65001 bit from the ASP script it prints ?'s just like the PHP.

I then turned my attention to finding a PHP equivilent of Response.CodePage = 65001 and found things like header('Content-Type:text/html; charset=UTF-8'); and ini_set('default_charset', 'UTF-8'); but they did not do the job.

Can anyone point me in the right direction?