First ladies Melania Trump and Peng Liyuan visited the Smithsonian's National Museum of Asian Art on Thursday, marking a public meeting between the spouses of the United States and China's leaders during a high-profile diplomatic visit to Washington. The visit aimed to celebrate cultural ties between the two countries. The first ladies left their husbands behind at the White House, where Donald Trump and Xi Jinping held private talks. They visited the museum after a White House welcome ceremony and before a state dinner. The museum, one of the largest of its kind in the United States, houses more than 46,000 objects dating from the Neolithic period to the present. The first ladies visited 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. They also viewed the "Princess from the Land of Porcelain," an oil painting by American artist James McNeill Whistler. This meeting between the first ladies was the first public meeting in nearly a decade between the spouses, with their last public meeting occurring in 2017 when President Donald Trump visited Beijing. 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 Liyuan, who has embraced a more public role than her predecessors, has been appearing more in public recently following a period of reduced visibility due to the COVID-19 pandemic and a cutback in diplomatic trips by her husband. She is also a public welfare advocate, including serving as an official antismoking ambassador in China and a World Health Organization goodwill ambassador for tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS. Melania Trump, who keeps a lower profile, often prefers to work behind the scenes. Peng’s last trip to the White House was in 2015, when President Barack Obama hosted Xi Jinping. During that visit, Peng 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. The Smithsonian's Asian art museum 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 has also 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." Every interaction between the first ladies will be scrutinized for clues about the standing between their countries, according to Yun Sun, director of the China Program at the Stimson Center.