Love in Hong Kong
Love in Hong Kong, also titled Love Songs of the Island, Vol. 4: Love in Hong Kong, is a Mandarin studio album recorded by Taiwanese singer Teresa Teng. It was released via Polydor Records Hong Kong on December 19, 1977. The album features the hit single "The Moon Represents My Heart", which went on to become a Mandopop classic.
Background and release
Love in Hong Kong was released through Polydor Records on December 19, 1977. It is labelled as Love Songs of the Island, Vol. 4: Love in Hong Kong, serving as the fourth record of her "Love Songs of the Island" album series under Polydor. The album spawned the single "The Moon Represents My Heart", a cover of Taiwanese singer Chen Fen-lan's 1973 song of the same name. It was written by Sun Yi and composed by Weng Cheng-hsi.
Reception
Love in Hong Kong received a platinum certification from the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry Hong Kong in 1979. At the 1978 RTHK Top 10 Gold Songs Awards held in Hong Kong, the ceremony's first edition, "Love in a Small Village" was one of the Top 10 Songs Award winners.
Legacy
Teng's music began to spread rapidly across mainland China in 1978, when the country instituted the open door policy that allowed gangtai cultural products to enter its borders. Professor of East Asian Studies Nimrod Baranovitch wrote that "'The Moon Represents My Heart' was the antithesis of the songs that people on the mainland had been listening to and singing in the previous thirty years or so". Its lyrics were centered around love and romance, "a theme that had almost disappeared from the popular music scene on the mainland after 1949 because of its association with 'decadent' 'bourgeois individualism.'" After the gradual opening of China's music market to gangtai artists following the Cultural Revolution, Baranovitch remarked that many of the most famous songs were those sung by Teng.