The Java Tutorials have been written for JDK 8. Examples and practices described in this page don't take advantage of improvements introduced in later releases.
To support supplementary characters without changing the char primitive data type and causing incompatibility with previous Java programs, supplementary characters are defined by a pair of code point values that are called surrogates. The first code point is from the high surrogates range of U+D800 to U+DBFF, and the second code point is from the low surrogates range of U+DC00 to U+DFFF. For example, the Deseret character LONG I, U+10400, is defined with this pair of surrogate values: U+D801 and U+DC00.