Huan Huan and Yuan Zi spent their last day at the panda breeding centre in southwestern China ahead of a ten year trip to France, with a farewell ceremony held in their honour.

The two pandas at the centre in the city of Chengdu will be flown to the French zoo they will call home for the next decade under an agreement reached between Paris and Beijing after years of top-level negotiations.

A deal on the endangered animals, who are famous for their reluctance to breed, was to have been announced at the G20 summit in the French resort of Cannes last November, but had to be delayed due to the crisis in the eurozone.

Huan Huan and Yuan Zi are the first pandas sent to France since the death of Yen Yen in 2000, given to the country's former president Georges Pompidou in the 1970s along with another panda, who died shortly after arriving.

The pair, who have been specially selected for their breeding potential, will leave Sunday on a private plane bound for the private Beauval zoo in the Loire region of central France.

But the French public will have to wait until February 11 to get their first glimpse of the bears in their specially built 2.5 hectare enclosure adorned with Chinese-style pagodas and marble lion statues.

David Algranti, who was named a "pambassador" in 2010 and spent several weeks as the bears' official guardian in Chengdu, was one of a handful of people given privileged access to the quarantined pandas.

"France is lucky to be getting these two, they are particularly lovable, and very good-looking," he said. "Huan Huan sticks out her tongue a lot and Yuan Zi loves to climb, he's quite sporty."