Ms. Yao (whose name was sometimes spelled Yao Lee) was born on Sept. 3, 1922, and raised in Shanghai. As a girl in the early 1930s she listened to Zhou on the radio but was too poor to buy her records. Ms. Yao herself began singing on the radio at 13 — at least once on a program with Zhou — and signed her first contract, with Pathé Records, a part of EMI, three years later. She became a popular nightclub attraction.

“Big movie stars like Li Lihua would come every Sunday to watch me perform and request specific songs,” she recalled in an interview in 2013 with The Glass, a cultural magazine.

She married Huang Baoluo in the late 1940s but did not stay in Shanghai much longer. The Communist Party took power in 1949 and, fearing that she might have to endure re-education by the new regime, she fled to Hong Kong with her husband the next year.

“I was so scared and very sad,” she told The Glass. “I thought my life, and career, were finished.”

They were not. The musical world of Shanghai was largely recreated in Hong Kong, which was then a British colony. EMI opened offices there and invited her and other Pathé artists to record. She also started working in the film industry, providing vocals that were lip-synced by the actress Chung Ching in a series of pictures, including “Songs of the Peach Blossom River” (1956).

By then Ms. Yao had begun to emulate the pop and country singer Patti Page by deepening her voice. She continued to sing into the mid-1960s. After her brother’s death, in 1967, she took an executive job at EMI.

Information about her survivors was not available.

Ms. Yao stopped making records, she said, because of the encroachment of modern studio technology.