builtin printf not printing unicode characters?

[pk]

The man page says that bash builtin printf supports the standard printf(1)
formats. But it seems that \uHHHH is not working:

$ /usr/bin/printf '\u212b\n'
Å
$ printf '\u212b\n'
\u212b

Am I doing something wrong here?
I see the same behavior with

GNU bash, version 3.2.13(1)-release (i486-pc-linux-gnu)
Copyright (C) 2005 Free Software Foundation, Inc.

and with

GNU bash, version 3.2.33(1)-release (i686-pc-linux-gnu)
Copyright (C) 2007 Free Software Foundation, Inc.

on two different computers.

Thanks