Staff prepare to load a caged panda onto an enclosed truck, which will carry the panda pair to the Shuangliu Airport in Chengdu and to be brought to Taiwan on a Taiwan flight on Tuesday, December 23, 2008. [Photo: Xinhua]

A pair of giant pandas offered by the Chinese mainland to Taiwan left Chengdu on Tuesday for the island.

The plane carrying the pandas, Tuan Tuan and Yuan Yuan, left at 2:20 p.m. from the Shuangliu Airport in the provincial capital of Sichuan and is expected to reach Taipei at about 5 p.m.

A send-off ceremony was held at the airport.

Tuan Tuan and Yuan Yuan "will sow the seeds of peace, solidarity and friendship on Taiwan's soil, with the good wishes of 1.3 billion mainland compatriots," said the mainland's State Council Taiwan Affairs Office Deputy Director, Zheng Lizhong, at the ceremony.

"They would also witness with us the beautiful prospects of the peaceful development of cross-Straits relations, the future of the common prosperity and the great revival of the Chinese nation," Zheng said.

Tuan Tuan, a male, and Yuan Yuan, a female, are four years old. They will live at the Taipei city zoo.

Zoo director Jason Yeh said at the Shuangliu Airport he felt very excited and happy as the pandas could go to Taiwan.

Yeh also thanked the mainland for its care of the pandas and pledged the zoo would do its utmost to breed and care for them.

About 20 experts and two of the pair's original keepers were on the flight to Taiwan. They brought a week's worth of food, such as bamboo and steamed corn buns.

Yin Hong, deputy director of the State Forestry Administration, said she believed the Taipei zoo was capable of caring for the couple.

"We will provide technical support without any reservation," she said at the airport send-off ceremony.

Seventeen Nyssaceae seedlings, a gift from the Qiang ethnic group in quake-hit Wenchuan County of Sichuan to show thanks for the Taiwan people's donations and help, were also on board the plane.

Li Chongxi, deputy chief of Sichuan's Communist Party committee, said the seedlings represented the confidence of Sichuan people in post-quake reconstruction and were proof of the mutual support of people across the Taiwan Straits.