Melania Trump and Peng Liyuan Visit the National Museum of Asian Art in Washington

On 24 September Melania Trump and Peng Liyuan, wife of the Chinese President Xi Jinping, visited the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Asian Art in Washington. The First Ladies came to the museum during the diplomatic visit of the Chinese delegation, while their husbands remained at the White House.

The First Ladies last met in public in 2017, when Donald Trump, in the course of his first presidential term, travelled to Beijing.

The National Museum of Asian Art unites two galleries of the Smithsonian Institution, the Freer Gallery and the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, and holds about 45,000 works. The Smithsonian Institution is what they call the largest complex of state museums and research institutions in the United States.

The guests were received by the museum's director, Chase Robinson, and the curator of Chinese art, Jan Stuart. The First Ladies viewed the Peacock Room, which the American artist James McNeill Whistler painted in 1876 and 1877 in blue-green and gold. The artist decorated the room for the London house of the shipowner Frederick Leyland, who kept his collection of Chinese porcelain in it. At the beginning of the twentieth century the American collector Charles Freer bought the room, and in due course it passed to the gallery that bears his name. The guests then looked at a Chinese porcelain vase of the eighteenth century, of the Qianlong period, from the Freer Gallery's collection. The Qianlong period is the name given to the reign of the Emperor Qianlong of the Manchu Qing dynasty, who ruled China from 1735 to 1796.

According to the Chinese broadcaster CGTN, Peng Liyuan thanked the American side for the fact that in recent years the United States has repeatedly returned cultural treasures to China, and expressed the hope of further co-operation between the two countries in cultural exchange and the protection of heritage. At the close of the visit a choir from the Chinese school "Hope" performed for the First Ladies the Chinese folk song "Jasmine Flower" and the song "Songs and Smiles". Peng Liyuan was formerly a well-known performer of folk songs, and she advised the children to keep on studying the Chinese language and culture.