Why Sa Dingding has China in her hand

Sa Dingding: 'Every day in the Mongolian grasslands I heard the people singing. It told me that music is freedom'

The eccentric costumes, ethereal beauty and haunting music of Sa Dingding have already made her China's biggest pop star. Now she's set to take Britain by storm. The precociously talented Mongolian talks to Sue Steward about zithers, pompoms and pigs

In one of MTV China's most popular videos, a beautiful woman stands in a long red frock straight from a pre-Mao soirée in old Shanghai; around her, kung-fu monks dance and wave ostrich-feather fans, leaping Crouching Tiger-like through the air. This is Sa Dingding, China's biggest pop star, whose album has sold more than two million copies in Asia and who is the first Chinese singer in a long time to have caught the attention of Western audiences.

Sa Dingding is a precociously talented singer-songwriter, a skilful player of traditional instruments and an insatiable student of languages, speaking Mandarin, Mongolian, Tibetan, Sanskrit and English (all but English are woven into her songs). Her sumptuously quirky costumes, which she designs herself, make even Christian Lacroix's recent foray into the exotic look dull. Just as the silk robe she wears on the cover of the album is constructed from colours, patterns and textures symbolising different locations, eras and cultures, so her songs are stitched together from different musical worlds, in a web of electronic beats punctuated with patches of sharp colour from the traditional instruments. She reflects certain key aspects of the new China: alluring, photogenic, intriguing and controversial, looking at once to the past and the future.

Sa Dingding's popularity at home has elevated her above the cloned armies of pretty teen poplets in the Asian charts, and her songs have drawn some of the world's leading DJ-producers, including Paul Oakenfold and Full Phatt, whose electronic wizardry reinvented hits by Kylie, the Rolling Stones and Radiohead. Her album, 'Wan Wushen', or 'Alive', recently won a BBC Radio 3 World Music Award in the Asia-Pacific category, and later this month British audiences can see her at the world-music festival Womad and at the Albert Hall in London.

Sa Dingding was born in Inner Mongolia on 27 December 1983, the Year of the Pig. A more unlikely creature could not be suggested for this beautiful, pale-skinned star, but she is proud of their shared qualities: 'A pig is very silent and serious,' she says, sipping tea in her Kensington hotel room. 'Serious about one thing: eating!' Her giggle is a surprise because, like the pig, she comes across as rather serious. 'I focus on one thing and give myself up to it. For me it's music.' Her passion to bring back traditions banned during the Cultural Revolution follows changes in the Chinese national curriculum, reinstating the teaching of traditional music. Apart from singing and composing songs in several languages, choreographing her shows and designing her costumes, Sa Dingding also plays the 2,500-year-old guzheng zither. And all of this at the age of 24.

Even at 11am, in an anonymous beige hotel suite, Dingding's appearance is an art form, from the purple high-heeled ankle boots fringed with iridescent bird feathers to the multicoloured layers of silky fabrics and black, almost waist-length hair, parted into long, straight sections over her shoulders. Her long false eyelashes flicker around her eyes and she wears apple-sized turquoise pompoms dangling from her ears on colourful plaited threads. 'I made them with my mother,' she says. 'They're Mongolian.'

Sa Dingding's mother is a Mongolian doctor and her father a Han Chinese government official. When she was a baby her parents moved around China to find work, as was the convention, and left their daughter with her grandmother in Mongolia. 'I lived in the grasslands and played outside every day,' she says. 'And every day I heard the people singing; those days told me that music is freedom.' They wintered in a house in a small city and in spring returned to the grasslands, where they lived with several other families in a yurt. Her grandmother sang songs to the child about Genghis Khan and about the animals, and called her granddaughter ding ding (Sa is her mother's family name), which means 'best best' in Mongolian.

When she was six Dingding joined her parents as they moved around the provinces of Yunnan and Sichuan. When she was 17 they arrived in Beijing, where they all still live together. Those journeys created a passion for languages, music and costumes, which now feeds her work. But where is her heart these days? 'My heart is in another world,' she replies, 'because I have imagination - more imagination every day when I face my computer and my heart runs everywhere. I still miss travelling because it was freedom for me. When I came to the city and went to school I didn't get used to it, but I used music and philosophy to relax, and expressed my emotions through my songs. Later I felt in my heart the grasslands, the buildings, the skies, the city, and when I opened my imagination I found the space again.' Her other way of finding space is reading old Chinese texts, she says. 'I want to reveal the "ancient time" to the young people, through my music.'

At college in Beijing her reputation for singing and dancing led to a suggestion from a producer that she enter a televised singing contest. 'It was very exciting to sing songs and dance on television,' she says, grinning. Aged 18 she won the competition and was voted best dance-music singer in China, but, instead of following the usual route into popdom, she started writing her own songs.

One song, Oldster by Xilin River, is a typical mix of old and new, blending heart-rending melodies on a traditional horse-hair fiddle with a child's singing (perhaps representing the young Dingding) and electronic effects. Intriguingly, she sings in her 'self-created language', a conglomeration of imitated, remembered and invented words used to capture a mood. She says she creates it by 'searching into my deep memory and emotions, for the language my grandma used to talk to me', and also from languages heard in her travels. She transcribes the lyrics phonetically for the album, short fragments resembling jazz scat lyrics, equally near-nonsensical and yet perfectly understandable.

She also sings in Tibetan and wears a dress constructed from imitation prayer flags to match her hypnotic singing of a Buddhist mantra. We meet the day after the riots in Paris over the arrival of the Olympic torch there, so I ask if she saw the news coverage. After a discussion with her interpreter, Dingding says that she would have seen it on the news in China, 'because everyone is caring about it', but she had been on the plane. A comment she made during an interview in April, saying she supported the Chinese government's policies, apparently led to Glastonbury dropping her as an act on the grounds that she was too 'controversial'. This time she treads a delicate path and refuses to be drawn on the issue. While she is happy to embrace Tibetan culture in her music, it seems it is too risky for a rising Chinese music star to comment on her country's policies (in fact, in many ways Dingding is actually in line with the new official directive promoting 'minority' cultures - which is reflected in the recent appearance of young Mongolian and Tibetan bands in the capital). She is also rumoured to be appearing at the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games in Beijing, which could bring her closer to her declared ambition to 'take music out of China into the whole world'.

She is an intriguing mix: wearing Mongolian pompom earrings modelled on those of Genghis Khan's time; playing a guzheng zither with a 2,500-year history; recording with cutting-edge DJs; wanting to conquer the Western music market, yet so conscious of her country's history it feeds everything she does. As Dingding rises from her chair with the grace of an emperor's daughter, moving on to the next of 37 European press interviews, I ask if she dreamed as a child of being a pop star. She explodes into laughter with an emphatic 'No!' then adds, 'But one day I signed my name on a piece of paper, and when my mother asked me what I was doing I answered, "I sign my name for my fans!" I was 10! I didn't know the definition of a fan, of course, but I was a fan of Michael Jackson.'

Sa Dingding is performing at the Royal Albert Hall, London SW7 (www.royalalberthall.com), on 30 July. Her album, 'Alive' (£10.99), is out now