Written and produced as a star vehicle for Anna May Wong. Earlier the same year she had been rejected for the lead in The Good Earth (1937), a role she strove to land. Losing the part to a white actress was a bitter pill for her to swallow.
Of this film, Anna May Wong told Hollywood Magazine, "I like my part in this picture better than any I've had before ... because this picture gives Chinese a break --- we have sympathetic parts for a change! To me, that means a great deal."
For her second film for Paramount, Daughter of Shanghai (1937), Anna May Wong played the Asian-American female lead in a role that was rewritten for her as the heroine of the story, actively setting the plot into motion rather than the more passive character originally planned. The script was so carefully tailored for Wong that at one point it was given the working title "Anna May Wong Story."
The airplane seen at the beginning of the film is a 1929 Lockheed Vega 5C, registration NC48M. It was owned by Paul Mantz, who supplied aviation services to the motion picture industry for decades. This plane can also be seen in Wings in the Dark (1935).
One of over 700 Paramount Productions, filmed between 1929 and 1949, which were sold to MCA/Universal in 1958 for television distribution, and have been owned and controlled by Universal ever since; its earliest documented telecast took place in Boston Wednesday 10 June 1959 on WBZ (Channel 4).