Freer Gallery of Art audio guide,
five stops, free.

The first thing you notice is the sway. Her weight rests on one leg, her hip pushes out to the side, her shoulders lean back the other way, and her head settles in between. Indian sculptors called this stance tribhanga, the triple bend, and it is the reason a metre of bronze standing perfectly still on its base seems to be moving.

The label calls her Queen Sembiyan Mahadevi as the Goddess Uma, and both halves of that title matter. The pose belongs to a goddess, and recalls Parvati. The queen was a real woman. Her husband, Gandaraditya Chola, ruled in the south of India from 949 to 957, and she was widowed young. From then on she wore white, the colour of mourning. Over some sixty years she poured her wealth into temples, building many and endowing many more. The museum calls her a highly respected patron of the arts.

In her own lifetime, her birthday was celebrated in a Shiva temple in a town that carried her name, and a metal portrait of the queen was presented to that temple in her honour. The museum is careful here: it says only that it is possible this is that very sculpture. What is certain is how a figure like this was used. It is a processional bronze. On festival days it would have been wrapped in silk, hung with jewellery and flower garlands, and carried through the streets for the whole town to see.

Now look at her face, because it is the best argument for the story. She has pursed lips and a long nose, and the museum calls the shape of her face uncommonly individual for an image of this kind. And yet nobody in the tenth century would have picked out the queen by likeness. A statue like this was known by where it stood and what was done with it, here the procession on her birthday. A face this particular, on a statue nobody needed to recognise, is exactly the kind of detail that keeps the portrait theory alive.

The Freer bought her in 1929, with the endowment named after its founder, and she has stood in this room since the current installation opened in 2017. Before you walk on, drop your eyes to her legs. The cloth is carved so thin that it clings like wet silk, and every fold runs with the sway of her body, down to the base her feet have stood on for a thousand years.

Next door, in Gallery 16, a long slab of grey marble, more than two metres wide, stands in front of you with two shorter pieces beside it. Together they are the base of a funerary couch: a stone platform, shaped like a Chinese bed, on which a coffin was laid in an underground tomb in sixth-century northern China.

Start in the middle. The incense burner with a bird on top, flanked by haloed heavenly beings standing on lotus flowers, is a Chinese Buddhist image through and through. Now look along the band above the openings. Those eight beaded circles frame musicians and dancers in foreign dress, carved in a Persian style. At each end, a guardian in a long coat and boots forces a wild animal to the ground.

The man laid on this bed was a Sogdian. The Sogdians came from Central Asia, and by the sixth century Chinese sources describe their communities scattered right across China, merchants and officials among them. Far from home they adopted Chinese customs, and a stone bed like this was one of them. But the carving on the rest of the couch mixed Buddhist images with Mazdean ones, from the faith whose priests tend a holy fire, and with scenes from the life of an immigrant who was apparently a leader of his community. His name went missing with his epitaph.

And most of the couch is not in this room. The tomb was found in 1911, and the pieces went onto the art market and scattered. The two gate walls, where priests with their mouths covered tend the fire, are in Cologne. Two back slabs went to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston in 1912, a side slab to the Musée Guimet in Paris in 1913, and the location of one side panel is still unknown. Nobody recognised that they belonged together until the scholar Gustina Scaglia made the connection in 1958.

Even where it came from is argued over. The Smithsonian's own research on the Sogdians says purportedly Anyang, near Ye, the capital of the Northern Qi dynasty. The museum's object record says scholars suggest it was made for Cave 4 at the northern Xiangtangshan cave temples, while admitting that a Buddhist cave was an unusual place for a burial.

Before you leave, find the lute on one of the side pieces. Its bent neck came into China with musicians travelling the Silk Road, and the instrument it influenced, the pipa, is still played in Chinese chamber ensembles. These three pieces of marble were already on show when the Freer first opened its doors, in May 1923.

Turn your back on the fireplace. You are standing inside the work now: a whole dining room, walls, shelves, ceiling and shutters, painted in blue and gold in 1876 and 1877 and brought here piece by piece from London, by way of Detroit. It is the one stop on this walk you can walk around inside.

It began as somebody else's design. The architect Thomas Jeckyll built this lattice of shelves for Frederick Leyland's collection of Chinese blue-and-white porcelain from the Kangxi period, and hung the walls with antique gilt leather painted with red roses. Then Jeckyll fell ill and had to give up the job. Whistler, who was decorating Leyland's entrance hall, offered to finish it. His first proposal was modest: paint the red roses over in yellow so they would stop fighting the princess, and add a wave pattern along the cornice and the panelling. Leyland agreed and went home to Liverpool.

Whistler kept going. He covered the ceiling with Dutch metal, an imitation gold leaf, and a pattern of peacock feathers. He gilded every shelf. Look at the window wall: the peacocks on the inside of the shutters are his too. He later said that he just painted on, without design or sketch, that it grew as he painted, and that by the time he came round to the corner where he had started, he had to paint part of it over again to match.

Then it went wrong. Whistler invited visitors and the press into Leyland's house to admire the room, and the two men fell out bitterly over the bill. So Whistler coated the costly old leather in Prussian blue, and on the empty wall facing the fireplace he painted what you see there now: two peacocks squaring up to each other. The furious bird has silver feathers at its throat, a jab at the ruffled white shirts Leyland always wore. The other has a single silver crest feather, like the white lock that rose above Whistler's own forehead. He called the mural Art and Money, or, The Story of the Room, and he is reported to have told Leyland that he would be remembered only as the owner of the Peacock Room. Then he signed the room several times with his butterfly.

Leyland left it as it was until he died in 1892. Twelve years later Charles Lang Freer bought it, had it taken apart in 1904 and rebuilt in his house in Detroit, where it held his own ceramics. After his death it came to Washington, and it has been here since the Freer Gallery opened in 1923. The room was restored again in the summer of 2022.

What stands on the shelves is the newest chapter. Since September 2025 the museum has shown the room as the Leylands knew it, filled with blue and white. Leyland collected porcelain from Jingdezhen, which from the late thirteenth century was the world centre for blue-and-white ware. On the fireplace wall and the window wall you are looking at Kangxi-period pieces from the museum's own collection. On the other two walls the pots are reproductions, made with potters in Jingdezhen today.

So stand in the middle and take it in whole: two walls of old porcelain and two of new, a quarrel in gold on one side of you, and on the other, the princess who started it all.