VARCHAR can store upto 255 chars before MySQL 5.0.3 and 65,535 chars in 5.0.3 and later versions.
To store large data in Mysql database you can use
TEXT , MEDIUMTEXT , LONGTEXT
TEXT can store 65,535 characters (approx 64KB)
MEDIUMTEXT = 16,777,215 characters (approx 16 MB)
LONGTEXT = 4,294,967,295 chars (approx 4GB)