The ghost from the past is my MySQL database encoded in tis620. Worse, the table and the column itself is labelled as iso-8859-1. Of course, if the web page is to be "viewed" as tis620, all I must to is to simply use

SET NAMES tis620;
SET CHARACTER SET tis620;

In my php code. However, this is not the case because the page itself is utf8.

What comes to help me is iconv. In short, this is what I did.

db_query("SET CHARACTER SET latin1");
$query = "SELECT * FROM table1
$result =  db_query($query);
$number_of_rows = $result->rowCount();
foreach ($result as $record) {
    printf iconv("ISO-8859-11", "UTF-8", $record->comment)
echo '</tr>'."\n";
}
db_query("SET CHARACTER SET utf8");