This problem seems more severe as the appended test case shows.

That gives me:

Expected:
    u'ī'
Got:
    u'\u012b'

Both literals are the same.

Unicode literals in doc strings are not treated as other escaped
characters: 

>>> repr(r'\n')
"'\\\\n'"
>>> repr('\n')
"'\\n'"

but:

>>> repr(ur'\u012b')
"u'\\u012b'"
>>> repr(u'\u012b')
"u'\\u012b'"

So there is no work around in the docstring's reference itself.

I file this here, even though the problems are not strictly equal. I do
believe though that there is or should be a common solution to these
issues. Both results need to be interpreted on a more abstract scale.