WASHINGTON — Melania Trump and Peng Liyuan on Thursday toured one of the largest Asian art museums in the United States, celebrating cultural ties between the U.S. and China during a high-profile diplomatic visit to Washington.
Inside the museum, the first ladies toured the Peacock Room, a gilded green, blue and gold dining room that was once housed in a London mansion before opening to the public in Washington in 1923. Peng, 63, has embraced a more public role than her predecessors, who rarely attended state visits and usually stayed in the background. Melania Trump, who is 56, keeps a lower profile, often preferring to work behind the scenes. Peng’s last trip to the White House was in 2015, when President Barack Obama hosted Xi. She has been an official antismoking ambassador in China, and in 2011 she was appointed as the World Health Organization goodwill ambassador for tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS. When Peng visited the White House in 2015, she joined first lady Michelle Obama at a naming ceremony for a giant panda at the National Zoo. The panda, Bei Bei , was later returned to China in 2019 to enter a breeding program.
Because of the COVID-19 pandemic and a cutback in diplomatic trips by her husband, she has been appearing more in public recently following a period in which she was less visible on the global stage. Leaving their husbands behind at the White House, the first ladies visited the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art in a display of soft power that united two figures known for fusing style and diplomacy . It was the first public meeting in nearly a decade between the spouses, one a former fashion model and the other a famed soprano. The first ladies arrived to crowds gathered on sidewalks across from the museum, many waving Chinese and American flags. The room was created by American artist James McNeill Whistler. The meeting drew global attention, featuring two powerful and glamorous women from the world’s two biggest economies. Just as likely to draw attention were their style choices, which are closely observed in fashion circles. A noted star before her husband’s rise, Peng ascended to national fame in the 1980s as a military singer, performing patriotic songs in full dress uniform. At one point, she turned and shared a laugh with Melania Trump. Peng is also a public welfare advocate, taking on roles that have little precedent for her position in China. The Smithsonian’s Asian art museum, located along the National Mall, has been a target of the Trump administration’s attempt to eliminate what it sees as liberal ideology from the institution’s museums. The ceremony also featured songs sung by preschoolers at a local Chinese immersion school. Associated Press writers Seung Min Kim, Didi Tang and Fu Ting contributed to this report. This article was generated from an automated news agency feed without modifications to text.
They also paused to look at a stone disk from ancient China, along with “Princess from the Land of Porcelain,” an oil painting by Whistler hanging in the Peacock Room and featuring a kimono-clad woman standing and holding a fan. Later, youngsters from Hope Chinese School serenaded the women with renditions of famous Chinese folk songs, “Song and Smile” and “Jasmine Flower. “They definitely add to the grandiosity and the symbolic significance of this trip,” said Yun Sun, director of the China Program at the Stimson Center, a Washington think tank. Every interaction between the first ladies was scrutinized for clues about the standing between their countries, Sun said.
They split off from the White House on Thursday while Donald Trump and Xi Jinping held private talks , touring the museum after a White House welcome ceremony and before a lavish state dinner. As the children’s choir sang on Thursday, Peng quietly mouthed some of the lyrics and later clapped along with the boys and girls. In a Fox News Channel interview on Wednesday, Melania Trump said she was taking Peng to the museum to show the “connection with the culture, with us and China.
It has been part of a broader Smithsonian effort to return stolen or unethically obtained objects to their home countries. The Asian art museum features more than 46,000 objects dating from the Neolithic period to the present, according to its website. Last year, the museum returned fragments of a silk manuscript from China that dated to more than 2,000 years ago and had been looted from a tomb.
The White House last year ordered a review of Smithsonian museums to make sure exhibits “celebrate American exceptionalism” and “remove divisive or partisan narratives.
During that trip, the first ladies shared tea at the Palace Museum and visited a school where students performed songs and dances. Their last public meeting was in 2017, when President Donald Trump stopped in Beijing during a tour of Asia in his first term.
Melania Trump did not attend her husband’s visit to Beijing earlier this year.
