Bao Li’s grandparents, Mei Xiang and Tian Tian, arrived in D.C. in 2000 and lived at the National Zoo for nearly a quarter-century. Over the years, they welcomed the zoo’s first-ever surviving panda cubs.

Eleven months after Washington's National Zoo sent its three wildly popular pandas — Mei Xiang, Tian Tian and their cub Xiao Qi Ji — back to China, a new pair of bears arrived in the United States on Tuesday.

Two giant pandas, a female named Qing Bao and a male named Bao Li, landed at Dulles International Airport on Tuesday and made their way to the Smithsonian’s National Zoo in Washington, D.C., from Chengdu, China. This comes almost a year after the zoo bid farewell to its last giant pandas, Tian Tian, Mei Xiang and Xiao Qi Ji in November.

Eleven months after the zoo sent its three wildly popular pandas — Mei Xiang, Tian Tian and their cub Xiao Qi Ji — back to China, a new pair of bears arrived in the United States on Tuesday. They will be transported from Dulles International Airport in suburban Virginia to the zoo.

After five months of anticipation and 6,000 miles in the air, D.C.'s nearly year-long panda drought ended Tuesday with the arrival of two new cubs from China in