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Ten pandas from Sichuan's Wolong Nature Reserve will greet visitors in Shanghai at next year's expo. [Asianews]

Shanghai Expo visitors will get the chance to cuddle up with a young group of the country's most adored animal, the Giant Panda.

Ten black-and-white bears under the age of five from Sichuan's Wolong Nature Reserve will migrate over to Shanghai Zoo early next year, where they will stay until the end of the expo next October.

They will join Shanghai city slickers Chuan Chuan, Zhuang Zhuang and Peng Peng.

One of the world's most rare and endangered species found only in China, roughly 1,600 wild pandas currently live in nature reserves in Sichuan, Gansu and Shaanxi provinces.

Though now facing extinction in their natural habits in mountainous regions and bamboo forests due to the increasing clearing of these lands for construction projects, pandas have been around for thousands of years.

Sometimes presented as an extension of Chinese goodwill, pandas have been historically gifted by China as a symbol of friendship. On a State visit to Japan last year, President Hu Jintao loaned two pandas to the Japanese as a token gesture.

Eight pandas welcomed visitors to the Beijing Olympics last summer - an act of hospitality Shanghai will repeat with hopes some 70 million visitors will visit the funny animal.

But not all attention will be lavished on to the pandas. They will share the spotlight with some recent arrivals, including a couple of Aldabra tortoises from the African Republic of Seychelles.

The 30-year-old male and female pair given to China from the tiny nation comprising 115 islands in the Indian Ocean is one of the world's longest-lived species - and the first of its lineage to live in Shanghai.

Traditionally representing strength, health and longevity, the tortoises are meant to speak to the friendship Seychelles sees in China, according to Philippe Le Gall, Seychelles' ambassador to China and the nation's commissioner-general of the Shanghai Expo.

To take care of its new friends, the zoo has built the hard-shelled creatures an 80-sq-m cage equipped with central heating to ensure they are kept warm through Shanghai's damp, cold winters.

The public will be invited to submit names for the tortoises next month. Chosen names will be given to the animals next year and officially introduced on June 18, when Seychelles celebrates its national day.

Winners will be awarded with a national delicacy, the Sea Coconut, a fruit which takes some six to seven years to grow.

A pair of male and female Felidae mountain lions will also join the pandas and tortoises. A native of the Americas, the fourth-largest of its species in the world are the latest members of the zoo family.

They are being housed in a newly constructed shelter that features several man-made jungles.

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