Teresa Teng

Teng Li-chun (Chinese: 鄧麗君; pinyin: Dèng Lìjūn; 29 January 1953 – 8 May 1995), commonly known as Teresa Teng, was a Taiwanese singer, actress, musician and philanthropist. Referred to by some as the "Eternal Queen of Asian Pop", she is considered to be one of the most successful and influential Asian artists of all time. Teng is recognized as a cultural icon for her contributions to Chinese pop, giving birth to the phrase, "Wherever there are Chinese-speaking people, there is the music of Teresa Teng." A polyglot, Teng's voice and emotionally resonant songs have transcended geographical, linguistic, and political boundaries, captivating audiences across the continent of Asia for several decades. With a career spanning of almost 30 years, Teng established herself as a dominant and influential force in Asia throughout most of her career, including East Asia, Southeast Asia, and, to some extent, South Asia. Teng is credited as the Far East's first pop superstar and by some as the pioneer of modern Chinese pop music — a major force in the development of the Chinese music industry by incorporating western and eastern styles into her music, replacing the most revolutionary songs (then prevalent in mainland China) and laying the foundation for modern Chinese popular music. Teng recorded more than 1,700 songs throughout her career, in her native language, Mandarin, but also in Hokkien, Cantonese, Shanghainese, Japanese, Indonesian, English, and Italian. Teng is considered instrumental in bridging the cultural gap across Chinese-speaking regions. She was one of the first artists to connect Japan to some of East and Southeast Asia by singing Japanese pop songs, according to Nippon. In Taiwan, she rose to fame for entertaining the armed forces and singing patriotic songs that appealed to the people of the island. Teng was nicknamed "the patriotic entertainer" and "the soldiers' sweetheart". To date, Teng's songs have been covered by hundreds of artists worldwide. According to IFPI's statistics, Teng has sold over 48 million albums, excluding sales in mainland China. In 1986, when Teng was 33, Time named her one of the seven greatest female singers in the world. In 2009, in an online poll by a Chinese government web portal to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the People's Republic of China, Teng was selected as the "most influential cultural figure in China since 1949" by 8.5 million netizens. On the eve of International Women's Day in 2010, she was named "the most influential woman in modern China" in a poll conducted by many well-known Chinese media from 1 March to 8 March. In 2022, a street was named after Teng in Ivry-sur-Seine, Grand Paris, from the Municipal council of France. On 21 September 2024, an Indo-Pacific Strategic Think Tank (IPST) conducted a poll in Japan with the question, "Who is the most famous person in Taiwan?" Teng won the poll with 53.8% of total votes. She was inducted into the "Popular Music Hall of Fame" at the Koga Masao Music Museum in Japan in 2007, with Teng being the first non-Japanese person to be inducted.