Panda ambassadors: good will, hard trip

China's giant pandas are on the move again.

Yuan Zai and Huan Huan will leave on Sunday for Beauval Zoo in central France, according tothe Chengdu panda research base.

This follows the arrival of another panda pair in Scotland on Dec 4.

Yuan Zai is male and Huan Huan female, and both were born at Chengdu.

Further details were not available but will be announced at a news conference on Tuesday.

Goodwill ambassadors through history

Giant pandas have been goodwill ambassadors for China for more than 1,000 years. They still serve that role, but animal conservation and scientific research, both nationally andinternationally, play a bigger part.

Although their mission is significant actually getting pandas to a foreign destination has neverbeen easy.

Wu Zetian, the first empress in China during the Tang Dynasty (AD 618-907), is said to havegiven a pair of pandas and 70 sheets of panda skin to Emperor Temmu of Japan in October 685.

The first person to take a living panda out of China was Ruth Harkness, an American fashiondesigner. She captured a 6-week-old cub during her exploration of a mountainous region inWenchuan county, Sichuan province, in 1936. She named the cub Su Lin, which means "a littlebit of something cute", after the sister-in-law of her expedition partner, Quentin Young.

With the help of friends, Harkness bribed customs officers to record her as "taking along abarking dog". Su Lin was carried onto the ocean liner President McKinley in a bamboo basketand then outside China. Later, the cub was sent to the Brookfield Zoo in Chicago and attractedas many as 40,000 visitors a day.

Sixteen pandas were taken out of China - some illegally - from 1936 to 1946, according to theChengdu Research Base. At least 70 dead, stuffed pandas are stored in museums of othercountries.

Since 1994, the Chengdu base and China Conservation and Research Center for the GiantPanda in Sichuan have sent at least 26 pandas to the United States, Australia, Japan, Thailand, South Korea, Spain, Austria and the United Kingdom for cooperative research on pandaconservation, breeding and veterinary medicine.

The pandas at the Edinburgh Zoo are female Tian Tian (Sweetie) and male Yang Guang (Sunlight), both born in August 2003. They left the Bifengxia Panda Base in Ya'an, Sichuanprovince, and spent a couple of weeks settling into their new home before public viewing openedon Dec 16.

They will be on loan to the Royal Zoological Society of Scotland for 10 years, and it is hoped theywill produce cubs during their stay. The projects make the Edinburgh Zoo the eighth zoo in theWestern Hemisphere to have giant pandas, and Beauval will be the ninth.