How to get traditional Chinese characters working under Gnome + Debian?

[Matthew Exon <72360005 exon dyndns org>]

Hi,

I'm trying to resolve a problem I've had for a long time with my system, 
which is that traditional Chinese characters turn up as boxes with hex 
characters in them.  Simplified Chinese seems to work fine.  For example:

Traditional: 中國 Simplified: 中国

The second character above is a box for me, the others are the real 
characters.  I know that the solution is to install an appropriate font 
 - the question is, which?  I installed a bunch of xfonts-intl-* 
packages, but they didn't seem to make any difference.

However, it looks fine in an xterm.  It doesn't work in gnome-terminal, 
 firefox, thunderbird, gedit, or any other application that seems 
more-or-less Gnomish, which is why I'm hoping I can find the answer in 
the gnome-list.

My real problem is that I just don't understand how all the fonts fit 
together - scalable fonts, bitmapped fonts, latex fonts,  postscript 
fonts, and the various conversion systems that all seem to  exist on my 
system.  Which of these are available to Gnome apps?  How do  Gnome apps 
choose one?  And how do I map from a Gnome name like "Sans"  to names like
"-Misc-Fixed-Medium-R-SemiCondensed--13-120-75-75-C-60-ISO10646-1"?  If 
 anyone can point me to some documentation where it's all explained, 
that'd be really helpful.  It's especially confusing with Unicode, where 
 as far as I can tell various different fonts will be used to render a 
 single piece of text, even though it's all "Sans".

I'm running Gnome 2.6, from the unstable Debian distribution.

Thanks,
Mat