"Rest assured, French friends, new giant pandas will arrive in the future," said Chen Dong, as he waited for the bears, both 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" programme, 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.