A team of technical experts from the Chinese mainland will arrive in Hong Kong on Tuesday to work on the final preparations for the handover of a pair of giant pandas to Hong Kong.

The mainland delegation headed by leader of the State Forestry Administration Zhao Xuemin will attend the giant panda handover ceremony to be held on Thursday at the Hong Kong International Airport, a government press release said Sunday.

The pandas are a gift of the Central Chinese Government for Hong Kong in commemoration of the 10th anniversary of the HK Special Administrative Region (HKSAR).

Both pandas were born in August 2005 at the China Panda Protection and Research Center in Wolong, Sichuan Province. The male young panda weighs 60 kilograms and the female, 61 kilograms.

Their names will be selected from amongst the 13,000 entries received in the Giant Panda Naming Activity launched by the HKSAR government.

In addition, Director of Wolong Nature Reserve Administration, Zhang Hemin, who is a member of the delegation, has been invited to give a talk on Tuesday on the conservation of giant pandas.

Zhang is also a member of the adjudication panel tasked to select a pair of names for the giant pandas

The Central Government presented the first pair of pandas, "An An" and "Jia Jia," to Hong Kong in 1999 as a gift to the HKSAR and inhabited them at the Hong Kong's Ocean Park.

(Xinhua News Agency April 23, 2007)