use strict;
use warnings;
use Encode qw(encode);
use XML::LibXML;

my $uchar = chr(195) . chr(154);
my $xml = '<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<container><node>'
. $uchar . '</node></container>';
output($uchar);
my $dom = XML::LibXML->load_xml(string => $xml);
my $node = $dom->findnodes('/container/node')->to_literal; 
output($node);
my $encoded = encode('UTF-8', $node);
output($encoded);

sub output {
     my $str = shift;
     print "$str\n";
     for (1..length($str)) {
          print ord(substr($str, $_-1)), ': ';
     }
     print "\n";
}