After months of talks, officials at Edinburgh Zoo have reached agreement with the Chinese Government to look after a breeding pair of giant pandas.

The zoo is owned by the same organisation that runs the popular attraction by Kincraig, where several species native to China have been bred and reared successfully.

That experience played a major part in persuading the Chinese to sign a letter of intent to allow a pair of their prized giant pandas to leave their country for life in a foreign zoo.

The endangered animals are revered in their native China, which keeps strict controls on their allocation to zoos around the world.

If the final stages of negotiations are successful, Edinburgh will become only the eighth zoo in the Western hemisphere to be entrusted with the care of these iconic animals.

The zoo is run by the Royal Zoological Society of Scotland (RZSS), and part of the case it made in talks with the Chinese Government was the expertise the society had gained in looking after Asian mountain species at the Highland Wildlife Park.

A spokesman for the society said: "The pandas would be one of a number of Chinese species we have. We like to care for those from a mountain environment at Kincraig.

"The experience gained at Kincraig was a very important part of the negotiation process. We always push the point that we already care successfully for Chinese species such as kiang and goral, and we already have red pandas there.

"Our mishmi takin recently produced offspring for the first time, and of course, that is an important thing for the giant panda breeding programme.

Officials at Edinburgh Zoo have reached agreement with the Chinese Government to look after a breeding pair of giant pandas.

"There are also similarities between the climates of Scotland and the Chinese mountains, and that is maybe one of the reasons they seem to do so well here."

The society regularly sends keepers from Edinburgh Zoo and other parks to Kincraig, and vice versa, to help share experience in the husbandry of the non-native species they care for.

This week a squadron from the Royal Engineers completed work on a new enclosure for the park's latest new Chinese arrivals – a group of Bactrian camels, a species said to be more endangered than the giant panda.

One male and three female camels are expected to be transferred from Edinburgh Zoo next month, and will make their home in a new camel house constructed over the past fortnight by Five Squadron of the Royal Engineers.

Bactrian camels take their name from the region near Iran where they were domesticated, and Staff Sergeant Ritch Hines was amused that he and his men should spend their time home in Britain building a house for camels.

"We have just come back from Iraq, so it's ironic that after six months in the desert, we have been asked to build a home for some camels," he said.

Two-humped Bactrian, or Asian, camels are believed to have been the ancestors of the more familiar one-humped Arabian camel, and are now thought to be all but extinct in the wild.

Today only 400 to 900 are said to survive in China, Tibet and Mongolia, but a captive breeding programme has been running in zoos for several years to help preserve the species.

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