Pandas arrive for new life in France

Huan Huan, one of the giant pandas arrives in a box at Roissy Airport, near Paris, yesterday. From Chengdu, the couple of pandas were sent on loan to the ZooParc de Beuval

Two Chinese pandas landed in Paris yesterday for a new life in a French zoo in a loan sealed after years of top-level negotiations between France and China.
The “Panda Express”, a Boeing 777 specially decorated with a panda motif, carried the bears from China’s Sichuan province to Charles de Gaulle airport, where staff from Beauval zoo were on hand to greet them.
Huan Huan (Happy) and Yuan Zi (Chubby) are the first pandas sent to France since 1973, when Yen Yen – who went on to live until 2000 – was given to then president Georges Pompidou along with another panda, which died shortly after arriving.
Specially selected for their breeding potential by their keepers in the city of Chengdu, they are bound for Beauval zoo in the Loire region of central France for a 10-year stay.
But the French public will have to wait until February 11 to get their first glimpse of the bears in their specially built 2.5 hectare (six acre) enclosure adorned with Chinese-style pagodas and marble lion statues.
A deal on the endangered animals, famous for their reluctance to breed, was to have been announced at the G20 summit in the French resort of Cannes last November, but had to be delayed due to the eurozone crisis.