Melania Trump and Peng Liyuan Tour Smithsonian Asian Art Museum

Melania Trump and Peng Liyuan toured the Smithsonian's National Museum of Asian Art on Thursday, setting aside the formalities of a state visit to highlight cultural connections between the United States and China.

The two first ladies left their husbands at the White House, where President Donald Trump and President Xi Jinping were holding private talks, and made their way to the museum on the National Mall. Their outing came after a White House welcome ceremony and ahead of a state dinner.

It marked the first public meeting in nearly a decade between the two spouses — one a former fashion model, the other a celebrated soprano. Their last such encounter was in 2017, when Trump visited Beijing during a tour of Asia and the pair shared tea at the Palace Museum and visited a school where students performed songs and dances.

Outside the museum, crowds gathered on the sidewalk, many waving Chinese and American flags and holding long banners with Chinese text.

Inside, the first ladies viewed the Peacock Room, an ornate dining room in shades of green, blue and gold created by American artist James McNeill Whistler. Originally housed in a London mansion, it opened to the public in Washington in 1923. They also saw Whistler's "Princess from the Land of Porcelain," an oil painting of a kimono-clad woman holding a fan that hangs in the room.

The visit carried symbolic weight. Yun Sun, director of the China Program at the Stimson Center, a Washington think tank, said the first ladies "definitely add to the grandiosity and the symbolic significance of this trip." Every interaction between them would be scrutinized for signals about the state of relations between the two countries, she said, and their fashion choices were likely to draw just as much attention.

"In terms of presentation, these two first ladies are going to be impeccable," Sun said, describing both as trained "professional presenters."

Peng has taken on a more public role than her predecessors, who rarely joined state visits and generally remained in the background. Before her husband's political rise, she became a national figure in the 1980s as a military singer who performed patriotic songs in full dress uniform. She has also served as an official antismoking ambassador in China and, in 2011, was appointed a World Health Organization goodwill ambassador for tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS.

Her public appearances have increased recently after a period of lower visibility during the COVID-19 pandemic and a reduction in her husband's diplomatic travel. Her previous visit to the White House was in 2015, when President Barack Obama hosted Xi; on that occasion she joined first lady Michelle Obama at a naming ceremony for a giant panda at the National Zoo. The panda, Bei Bei, was later sent to China in 2019 for a breeding program.

Melania Trump, by contrast, tends to keep a lower profile and often works behind the scenes. In an interview with Fox News Channel on Wednesday, she said she was taking Peng to the museum to show the "connection with the culture, with us and China."

The Smithsonian's Asian art museum is among the largest of its kind in the United States, with more than 46,000 objects spanning the Neolithic period to the present. It has also drawn attention amid the Trump administration's efforts to remove what it describes as liberal ideology from Smithsonian institutions; the White House ordered a review last year to ensure exhibits "celebrate American exceptionalism" and "remove divisive or partisan narratives."

The museum has participated in broader Smithsonian efforts to return stolen or unethically obtained objects. Last year it returned fragments of a silk manuscript from China dating back more than 2,000 years that had been looted from a tomb.