How Anna May Wong became TV’s first female detective

All copies are now lost, but the 1950s TV show The Gallery of Madame Liu-Tsong was a genuine landmark in television history: the first show with an Asian-American star and the first centred around a female sleuth.

Anna May WongImage preserved by the BFI National Archive

Anna May Wong was a pioneering Chinese-American actress who was active from the silent era but all-too-often found herself stereotypically cast in Hollywood. She found more rewarding roles in Europe. Latterly her achievements were acknowledged in her own land and significantly she was recognised by the US Mint. Her face was featured on the fifth coin in the American Women Quarters programme, a four-year series celebrating “the accomplishments and contributions made by women who have shaped history”.

Not least among these accomplishments, although barely known, is that the enigmatic star holds a very important and trail-blazing place in the history of the small screen too. In the late 1940s and early 1950s in America, there were four main TV networks: ABC, NBC, CBS and DuMont. DuMont was undoubtedly the ‘poor cousin’ of the quartet. It did not have a successful radio tradition from which to draw talent, and it did not have unlimited funds. But it made up for these shortcomings by being truly innovative and delivering a number of US TV firsts, including the first live-action sci-fi series (Captain Video and his Video Rangers, 1949 to 1955), the first sitcom (Mary Kay and Johnny, 1947 to 1948), the first soap opera (Faraway Hill,1946), the first networked game show (Cash and Carry, 1946 to 1947) and the first show fronted by a Black American woman (The Hazel Scott Show, 1950). 

It also scored two notable firsts with its series The Gallery of Madame Liu-Tsong (1951), which was the first series to feature a female sleuth and also the first series to have an Asian-American star. It was claimed the show was especially written for Wong (and indeed Liu-Tsong was her real name). She played the title character, an art expert who became involved in international intrigues, tackling criminals working in the world of art and antiques. 

Anna May Wong discussing The Gallery of Madame Liu-Tsong (1951) with director William Marceau

The series ran for 13 episodes and reputedly had inauspicious beginnings but improved as it continued. Very few reviews of the show are available and the majority of those aren’t complimentary, though most have good things to say about the star. But regardless of the merits or otherwise of the show, it is its very existence that is so fascinating, being far ahead of its time. Although Mr and Mrs North, which ran on CBS from 1952 to 1953, featured a husband-and-wife team, it wasn’t until six years after The Gallery of Madame Liu-Tsong that another crime show with a solo female lead hit the airwaves, with 1957 bringing both CBS’s Assignment Foreign Legion starring British-Indian star Merle Oberon and the syndication of the undercover policewoman series Decoy.

The Gallery of Madame Liu-Tsong is long forgotten now, merely an interesting footnote in the history of American television. This is partly because, sadly, no episodes survive. The (possibly apocryphal) story goes that back in the 1970s the then owners of the DuMont archive were faced with the spiralling costs of maintaining a temperature-controlled repository for a vast amount of old and creaky TV films. A lawyer came up with a cost-saving solution: loading up three semis with the material, driving it over to the Hudson and dumping the whole lot into the river, where, presumably, it resides to the present day.

A sad watery grave for a true TV milestone.


Anna May Wong: The Art of Reinvention plays at BFI Southbank in September and October 2025.