diff --git a/src/commoncode/resource.py b/src/commoncode/resource.py
index 64dbe7c..d19e2da 100644
--- a/src/commoncode/resource.py
+++ b/src/commoncode/resource.py
@@ -389,7 +389,7 @@ def _get_resource_cache_location(self, path, create_dirs=False):
         path = clean_path(path)
 
         # for the cached file name, we use an md5 of the path to avoid things being too long
-        resid = str(md5(path.encode("utf-8")).hexdigest())
+        resid = str(md5(path.encode("utf-8", "surrogateescape")).hexdigest())
         cache_sub_dir, cache_file_name = resid[-2:], resid
 
         parent = join(self.cache_dir, cache_sub_dir)
diff --git a/tests/test_resource.py b/tests/test_resource.py
index 9711b66..6249ebb 100644
--- a/tests/test_resource.py
+++ b/tests/test_resource.py
@@ -695,6 +695,11 @@ def test_codebase_cache_default(self):
         child_2 = codebase.get_resource(path=child.path)
         assert child_2 == child
 
+    def test_codebase_cache_handles_non_utf8_path(self):
+        test_codebase = self.get_test_loc("resource/cache2")
+        codebase = Codebase(test_codebase)
+        codebase._get_resource_cache_location("resource/cache2/\udce9", create_dirs=True)
+
     def test_codebase_cache_all_in_memory(self):
         test_codebase = self.get_test_loc("resource/cache2")
         codebase = Codebase(test_codebase, max_in_memory=0)