Natural Sound Family, friends and fans of Taiwanese singer Teresa Teng paid their last respects to her at the City Funeral Parlour in Taipei on Sunday. The singer, whose ballads won fans in Taiwan and China and elsewhere in Asia in the 1980s died of asthma earlier this month in Thailand. She was only 42. She is missed deeply by her fans in Taiwan, where she is regarded as a national heroine. Teng will be buried in Jin Bao Shan cemetery, on the north-east coast of Taiwan. To many of her fans, Teresa Teng was more than just a pop star - she stood for democracy. In the 1980s, China's communist government banned Teng's sentimental love songs as `spiritual pollution'. She never performed there, but her tapes were circulated widely in China..smuggled through Hong Kong. Teng stood firm in her anti-communist views, by refusing to hold concerts on the mainland, even after the travel ban for Taiwanese to China was dropped in 1987. In 1989, after China cracked down on pro-democracy students in Tiananmen Square, Teng attended concerts and protests in Hong Kong and Paris. Teng, who retired from performing professionally in recent years had been living in France. Over the last few years, she returned to Taiwan to stage charity concerts for military servicemen, but had declined to give TV interviews. Teng began singing at the age of six, and had produced hundreds of records in Taiwan, Japan and Hong Kong, and since the announcement of her death, record shops in Taipei have been sold out. You can license this story through AP Archive: http://www.aparchive.com/metadata/youtube/2d7d0332186253b489653e9b57dcc560 Find out more about AP Archive: http://www.aparchive.com/HowWeWork