Melania Trump takes China's first lady on a museum outing that's watched for diplomacy and style

WASHINGTON (AP) — 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.

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.

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. The room was created by American artist James McNeill Whistler.

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.”

The meeting had the potential to become a global spectacle, featuring two powerful and glamorous women from the world's two biggest economies.

“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 expected to be scrutinized for clues about the standing between their countries, Sun said. Just as likely to draw attention were their style choices, which are closely observed in fashion circles.

Their last public meeting was in 2017, when President Donald Trump stopped in Beijing during a tour of Asia in his first term. During that trip, the first ladies shared tea at the Palace Museum and visited a school where students performed songs and dances. Melania Trump did not attend her husband’s visit to Beijing earlier this year.

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.

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.

Peng’s last trip to the White House was in 2015, when President Barack Obama hosted Xi. 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.

As the children's choir sang on Thursday, Peng quietly mouthed some of the lyrics and later clapped along with the boys and girls. 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. 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.

She has been appearing more in public recently following a period in which she was less visible on the global stage because of the COVID-19 pandemic and a cutback in diplomatic trips by her husband.

The Smithsonian's Asian art museum is one of the largest of its kind in North America. It also has been a target of the Trump administration’s attempt to eliminate what it sees as liberal ideology from the institution's museums.

The White House last year ordered a review of Smithsonian museums to make sure exhibits “celebrate American exceptionalism” and “remove divisive or partisan narratives.”

The museum, located along the National Mall, features more than 46,000 objects dating from the Neolithic period to the present, according to its website. It has been part of a broader Smithsonian effort to return stolen or unethically obtained objects to their home countries. 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.

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.”

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 ceremony also featured songs sung by preschoolers at a local Chinese immersion school. The panda, Bei Bei , was later returned to China in 2019 to enter a breeding program.

Associated Press writers Seung Min Kim, Didi Tang and Fu Ting contributed to this report.