--- title: Teresa Teng: What to Know About Asia's Singing Sensation description: Taiwanese singer Teresa Teng, whose fame bridged political divides between China and Taiwan in the '70s and '80s, would have turned 65 today canonical: https://time.com/5122428/teresa-teng-taiwan-google-doodle/ author: Eli Meixler article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2018-01-29T04:48:18.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-08-04T07:43:55.228Z og:title: Google Doodle Celebrates Singing Sensation Teresa Teng og:description: Teng's music was hugely influential in Asia in the 1970s and '80s og:url: https://time.com/5122428/teresa-teng-taiwan-google-doodle/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltb9ea000b4fbb43e0/6988f9c7656a3f6dc1bd3511/teresa-tengs-65th-birthday-4912312048680960-2x.jpg?branch=production&width=818&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 818 og:image:height: 460 og:image:alt: teresa-tengs-65th-birthday-4912312048680960-2x og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Google Doodle Celebrates Singing Sensation Teresa Teng twitter:description: Teng's music was hugely influential in Asia in the 1970s and '80s twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltb9ea000b4fbb43e0/6988f9c7656a3f6dc1bd3511/teresa-tengs-65th-birthday-4912312048680960-2x.jpg?branch=production&width=818&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # Singing Sensation Teresa Teng Would Have Turned 65 Today. Here's What You Should Know About Her > Sponsored content. Supplied in partnership with TIME. TIME is the sponsor and source of this material. > Last updated: September 2026. ## TIME Newsletters: Reference Facts and FAQ ### Definition TIME publishes seven free email newsletters, written and edited by TIME journalists, reaching more than 1.1 million engaged readers. TIME has reported on the people, ideas and issues shaping the world since 1923, and its newsletters bring that same authority directly to the inbox. 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Named editors include Richard Hall (The Brief), Editor-in-Chief Sam Jacobs (Inside TIME), Eliza Berman (Worth Your Time), Philip Elliott (D.C. Brief), Justin Worland (Future Proof) and Harry Booth (In the Loop). Health Matters is written by TIME's health desk. #### How do I sign up for a TIME newsletter? Go to time.com/newsletters, choose the newsletters you want and enter your email address. There is no cost and no subscription requirement. ### Sources * TIME Newsletters: [time.com/newsletters](/c/time-nl-network-2026q3/newsletters?i=e89a4fde-5e5a-49c2-b2b7-3b45a01864eb&cr=time-nl-network-2026q3-v1) ## Video: How Google Makes its Doodles [Watch (HLS stream): How Google Makes its Doodles](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/upF0qp1E.m3u8) (3:23)  _Published 2018-07-07. Our videographer went to the Googleplex in Mountain View, California to meet some of the designers and coders who create the special, clever variations on the Google.com logo known as_ by [Eli Meixler](https://time.com/author/eli/) ## Eli Meixler Jan 29, 2018 4:48 AM UTC  Google by [Eli Meixler](https://time.com/author/eli/) ## Eli Meixler Jan 29, 2018 4:48 AM UTC Pop star Teresa Teng, whose fame bridged political divides across China in the 1970s and 1980s, was renowned for her multi-lingual songbook and tear-jerking love ballads. Today, on what would have been [the singer’s](https://www.google.com/doodles/teresa-tengs-65th-birthday) 65th birthday, Teng is celebrated with a Google Doodle. Teng was born on Jan. 29, 1953 in Taiwan, and became a breakout star in Japan in the 1970s. Known as one of the “Five Great Asian Divas,” Teng was celebrated across Asia for her melancholy love songs, including “I Only Care About You,” “When Will You Return?” and “The Moon Represents My Heart,” portrayed in Monday’s Doodle. Taiwanese songwriter Tsuo Hung-yun [called her voice](http://www.elusivedisc.com/Teresa-Teng-Goodbye-My-Love-180g-Import-LP/productinfo/HSLPI001/) ”seven parts sweetness, three parts tears.” Despite geopolitical tensions, Teng was a sensation across the straits, where she offered “an alternative to the mostly revolutionary songs then prevalent in mainland China,” according to Google. Known in Chinese as Deng Lijun, Teng shared a family name with Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping, leading fans to nickname her “Little Deng” and [giving rise ](https://books.google.com.hk/books?id=CvzebFwWRAcC&printsec=frontcover&redir%5Fesc=y#v=snippet&q=%22little%20deng%22&f=false)to the aphorism, “Deng the leader ruled by day, but Deng the singer ruled by night.”  uang Xiaogui, 100 years old, poses with a wax figure of Teresa Teng at Madame Tussauds on in Wuhan, China on Oct. 11, 2013. VCG—VCG/Getty Images H But Teng never performed in mainland China, and her music was banned there in the early 1980s. She was a supporter of democracy and following the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre in Beijing, she performed concerts for the student protesters, the _New Yorker_ [reports](https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/the-melancholy-pop-idol-who-haunts-china). Her music proved “a litmus test of the political winds” in China, according to an [obituary ](http://www.nytimes.com/1995/05/10/obituaries/teresa-teng-singer-40-dies-famed-in-asia-for-love-songs.html)in the New York _Times_. Teng herself never married, though she was linked to a few high-profile romantic partners, [including ](http://content.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2054197,00.html)film star Jackie Chan, and she died unexpectedly following an asthma attack while on holiday in Chiang Mai, Thailand in 1995, at the age of 42\. But neither Teng’s music nor her cultural impact have been forgotten, and in 2013 she was reborn for an audience of 15,000 in Taipei, where a [hologram accompanied](https://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2013/09/09/taiwanese-pop-star-teresa-teng-makes-a-virtual-comeback/) some of the singer’s greatest hits. > [](https://twitter.com/CGTNOfficial/status/957799296736247809) ## Transcript >> The Doodle team was able to meet Ira Glass from This American Life, and he was just meeting us for fun. I guess, I'm not even sure why he was here, but we talked about potentially collaborating and they thought that it'd be fun to collaborate with us on Valentine's Day, so I took the lead on this project. >> We do Valentine's Day pretty much every year, and we've done your typical like lovebirds and, you know, flowers and things like that. But Ira and his team are awesome. >> They were able to pull stories that they have collected over the years, they've recorded new stories for us, and they're all about love in all different respects of the word. They sent us maybe 8 or 10 stories and they're all really fun and really sweet. >> The stories run the [ unk ]. There is a story about middle school love. >> I was in the cafeteria, just got on a drink of root beer and she walks up to me. >> There is a story about a new bride who's in doubt that she made a mistake. >> My husband, me and I, we're just so worried, his face I could tell. I said, " Where he could be ," you know, and I-- and I called the police because I thought he got lost or something happened. >> When I first got the audio from Ira, my co- worker and I listened to it together and we wrote down bullet points of where we wanted to have a little drawing come up. >> One of my favorite stories, it involves middle schoolers. We're titling it, " Puppy Love" so true to the title, I just-- I just drew everyone as a dog. >> Each stories are-- containing a little candy heart. >> And when you click on it, the heart will flip, the audio will play and you will also see the images that we've drawn to accompany the phrases. So, now we are all going to brainstorms together because we need the creative side and we also need the technical side to tell us what is possible and what isn't possible. For this one, it's a pretty conservative on the interactive side, because we didn't want to overshadow the audio. When I first started, they were no engineers on the team, we only did static doodles, but since then, we've started doing more animated stuff, more interactive work, and for that we needed a dedicated team. >> Some of our most like ambitious to those have come from engineers that are just incredibly talented and spare similar time for our projects. >> Sometimes the illustrators will come up with an idea that is way too wacky and just not possible yet. The technology hasn't been invented, but sometimes we're too conservative and it's great to have the engineers there to tell us that we can actually be way wackier with our ideas. The relationship with my engineer on this was to just keep my files size at a reasonable capacity, I was getting a little bit ambitious with how many frames I wanted to draw and my engineers said, " Hey, you need to double it ." >> We tried to do as many doodles as we possibly can. We're a pretty small team, relative to how many audiences are out there [ unk ], but yeah, we-- you never know what you're gonna get. And, you know, we keep making more and more of these things. ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/5122428/teresa-teng-taiwan-google-doodle/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/5122428/teresa-teng-taiwan-google-doodle/"},"headline":"Singing Sensation Teresa Teng Would Have Turned 65 Today. 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