Edinburgh zoo pandas- Two giant pandas are set to arrive at Edinburgh Zoo in Scotland on Sunday on a eagerly anticipated ten-year loan from China, agreed after years of high-level political and diplomatic negotiations. Yang Guang (Sunshine) and Tian Tian (Sweetie) are a breeding pair and the zoo is hoping Tian Tian will give birth to cubs during her stay.
The pandas, which were both born in 2003 and have been living in Sichuan Province, will fly to Edinburgh on a Boeing 777 freighter courtesy of FedEx.
They will spend a couple of weeks settling in before being put on public display, and the zoo has already reported a huge spike in ticket sales.
Edinburgh Zoo is paying about $1 million (750,000 euros) a year to the Chinese authorities for the pandas, the first in Britain for 17 years.
It has built two seperate enclosures for the visitors, which are quite solitary, although they will be linked by a passageway dubbed the 'tunnel of love' in anticipation of their hoped-for mating.
Each area contains an indoor section and a large outdoor enclosure, comprising lots of plants, trees, a pond and somewhere for them to shelter from the sun, a spokeswoman for the zoo said.
The pandas are expected to eat 20 three-metre long bamboo stems a day between them, at a cost of up to £70,000 a year, choosing from 25 different varieties, most of them imported from the Netherlands.
As of December 16, visitors to the zoo will be able to look in on the outdoor enclosure, while "panda-cams" placed at strategic locations will allow Internet users to watch the movements of Yang Guang during daylight hours.
"Everybody is very excited about their arrival," the zoo spokeswoman said.
The agreement to loan the pandas was announced in January following five years of negotiations, and experts from the China Wildlife Conservation Association gave the final go-ahead after a visit to Scotland in October.
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