Melania Trump and Peng Liyuan spotlight US-China cultural ties in Washington
Melania Trump and Peng Liyuan toured the Smithsonian's National Museum of Asian Art in Washington on Thursday, marking a public display of cultural ties between the United States and China during a high-profile diplomatic visit. The outing, held while Donald Trump and Xi Jinping were engaged in private talks at the White House, brought together the spouses for their first public meeting in nearly a decade.
The two first ladies visited the museum after a White House welcome ceremony and before a state dinner. The meeting drew attention because of their public profiles and the symbolism attached to the visit. Yun Sun, director of the China Programme at the Stimson Center, said, "They definitely add to the grandiosity and the symbolic significance of this trip." She also said, "In terms of presentation, these two first ladies are going to be impeccable," adding that both are trained as "professional presenters."
Crowds gathered on the pavement across from the museum, with many waving Chinese and American flags. Some also held long banners in Chinese. Inside, Melania Trump and Peng visited the Peacock Room, a green, blue and gold dining room that was once part of a London mansion before opening to the public in Washington in 1923. The room was created by American artist James McNeill Whistler. They also viewed Whistler's oil painting "Princess from the Land of Porcelain", which hangs in the room and shows a woman in a kimono holding a fan.
Their last public meeting was in 2017, when Donald Trump visited Beijing during his first term. At that time, the first ladies had tea at the Palace Museum and visited a school where students performed songs and dances. Melania Trump did not join her husband's visit to Beijing earlier this year. Peng has taken a more public role than many of her predecessors, who rarely joined state visits and mostly remained in the background, while Melania Trump has generally kept a lower profile and often worked behind the scenes.
Peng last visited the White House in 2015, when Barack Obama hosted Xi Jinping. Before her husband's rise, she was already well known in China as a military singer in the 1980s, performing patriotic songs in full dress uniform. She has also taken up public welfare work, serving as an anti-smoking ambassador in China and being appointed a World Health Organization goodwill ambassador for tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS in 2011. Her public appearances have increased again after a period of lower visibility during the COVID-19 pandemic and a reduction in her husband's diplomatic travel.
The Smithsonian museum they toured is one of the largest Asian art museums in the United States and has more than 46,000 objects from the Neolithic period to the present, according to its website. It has also been part of efforts to return stolen or unethically obtained objects to their home countries, including fragments of a silk manuscript from China that dated back more than 2,000 years and were returned last year after being looted from a tomb. The museum has also been caught up in the Trump administration's push to review Smithsonian exhibits to ensure they "celebrate American exceptionalism" and "remove divisive or partisan narratives."
In an interview with Fox News Channel on Wednesday, Melania Trump said she was taking Peng to the museum to show the "connection with the culture, with us and China." Peng's previous White House visit in 2015 had included a naming ceremony for a giant panda at the National Zoo with then first lady Michelle Obama. Thursday's museum tour again placed the focus on cultural exchange, as the two first ladies met publicly for the first time since 2017 during a closely watched US-China visit.
