Male Panda Yuan Zi is lying in his internal enclosure before his last public snack at the Beauval Zoo in Saint-Aignan-sur-Cher, central France, on November 23, 2025. GUILLAUME SOUVANT / AFP
China will send new giant pandas to France, a Chinese embassy official said, as an elderly pair was set to fly back home from Paris on Tuesday, November 25. “Rest assured, French friends, new giant pandas will arrive in the future,” said Chen Dong, as he waited for the bears, both aged 17, to take off from Paris’s Charles de Gaulle airport.
Huan Huan and her partner Yuan Zi arrived at the Beauval Zoo in 2012 as part of China’s “panda diplomacy” program, which sees the black-and-white bears dispatched across the globe as soft-power ambassadors. The two pandas were meant to stay in France until January 2027, but female panda Huan Huan was diagnosed with kidney failure.
The pair were loaded onto a truck bound for a Paris airport, each in their own box with a glass window dotted with ventilation holes, with the words “Bon voyage” and their name inscribed on the side.
More than 200 well-wishers braved a cold and rainy Sunday to say farewell, including one couple dressed head-to-toe in panda-themed gear, who say they have visited the bears “more than a thousand times” since their arrival in 2012.
Huan Huan and Yuan Zi were escorted to Paris-Charles de Gaulle airport under heavy police protection for their 12:30 pm flight on Tuesday.
‘Engraved in our hearts’
The pair produced three cubs while in France – the first pandas to do so in the country – and became star attractions at the Beauval zoo in Saint-Aignan-sur-Cher, which welcomed some two million visitors in 2023.
The decision to send them back to China came after Huan Huan was diagnosed with chronic kidney disease – a common condition in bears around her age, according to zoo director Rodolphe Delord. The move came with “a twinge of sadness,” Delord said.
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But the twins born in 2021 are expected to remain at Beauval for now, said Delord, adding he hopes to extend the zoo’s partnership with China beyond 2027. The eldest of the offspring, Yuan Meng, left France for his ancestral China in 2023.
For panda keeper Delphine Pouvreau, their departure will be “very hard” for the caretakers, who have forged a strong bond with the bears. “We experienced the first birth of a baby panda in France here,” she said, adding the memory would remain “engraved in our hearts.”
The giant panda was downgraded last year from “endangered” to “vulnerable” on the global list of at-risk species. Only about 20 zoos outside China have pandas, which have become a symbol of Beijing’s diplomatic friendships.
China has been using so-called panda diplomacy, in which the bears are sent across the globe as soft-power ambassadors, for decades. In 1972, it gifted a pair of pandas to Washington, following US President Richard Nixon’s historic visit to the nation.