bash prints numeric values of unicode characters instead of their UTF8 representations

[Yuri]

I have this line in ~/.bashrc:
PS1=$'\\[\e[0;38;5;202m\\]\u2514\u2023\\[\e[0m\\] '

My command prompt looks like this:
root2514root2023

What makes bash print unicode charater ascii values?

bash-4.3.42
FreeBSD-10.3
LANG=en_US.UTF-8
terminal is konsole from kde4

Yuri