Rita Chao, best known to her Mandarin-speaking fans as 凌雲 (…Ling Yun or Ling Ying), was born in Singapore, sometime in 1949 or early 1950. She started singing at the age of 8 and was already working as a singer and actress at 14.
Her parents saw her potential as an artist quite soon, and decided to pull Rita out of school to join the Opera troupe and she was performing Chinese Opera on stage. At the end of 1965 - when she was just 15 - while touring Malaysia with her former group, she joined a band called Super XX. Rita was discovered on the local entertainment scene by Su Yin (舒雲), a.k.a. Henry Foo, a Singaporean singer, songwriter and lyricist, who at the time was also the A&R manager for the Chinese section at Columbia / EMI.
In 1966 she was signed by the label and released her very first 7" EP. On this record, she was paired with the top guitar band from Singapore, The Quests. The EP sold over 50.000 copies, and for Rita it was instant stardom. During those days Rita met Sakura Teng (櫻花). Sakura was already a star singing at various Cabarets throughout South East Asia. In 1967 Rita and Sakura began performing as a double act and toured Singapore, Malaysia, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Japan, building a fan base.
During her heyday Rita Chao recorded many great Mandarin covers of popular English songs and she was part of the pioneers who launched the Rock Movement in Singapore. Along with Sakura, they were both known as 'A Go-Go Queens of the Sixties"; in those days, they used to perform at the now defunct New World Amusement Park and they both lived in Jalan Besar. Rita's career lasted about ten years. In 1975, when her last solo album was released, she declared in an interview that she was about to make a movie in Hong Kong and that she was tired of singing all the time... In 1980-81 she briefly returned releasing two albums with Sakura, just before disappearing completely.
She passed away in July 2014 after suffering from colon cancer.
