Teresa Teng recorded seventeen hundred songs across eight tongues
Taiwanese singer Teresa Teng (1953–1995) dominated East and Southeast Asian pop for nearly thirty years. She cut more than 1,700 songs in Mandarin plus Hokkien, Cantonese, Shanghainese, Japanese, Indonesian, English, and Italian, selling over 48 million albums outside Mainland China.
Born Teng Li-yun on 29 January 1953 in Yunlin County to waishengren parents—her father a Republic of China soldier—she was the only daughter among five children raised in poor military villages. Time magazine named her one of seven greatest female singers worldwide in 1986.
Her parents loved opera, her father Peking opera and her mother Huangmei opera, and at six she began voice lessons with an Air Force band instructor. In 1964 she won her first major prize singing Visiting Yingtai from the Shaw Brothers film The Love Eterne. By 1967, at 14, she had left school, was hosting the television show One Star a Day and starring in the film Thank You, Manager; a 1968 spot on The Gathering of Stars brought her first real fame.
In the 1970s she blended pop and opera with Western jazz and recorded in several languages, playing her first concert in Vancouver in April 1979 before touring US cities. Her songs began seeping into mainland China around 1974 by radio, and by 1977 The Moon Represents My Heart was among the first outside songs to reach mainland listeners. In the early 1980s Beijing banned her music as bourgeois, yet it kept spreading.
Her most acclaimed album, Dandan youqing, or Light Exquisite Feeling, released in 1983 after she joined Taurus Records, set twelve Tang and Song dynasty poems to modern arrangements. It sold more than five million copies across Asia and remained the best-selling Chinese album as of August 2008. She is widely credited as the Far East's first pop superstar.
Source: Teresa Teng
