China and Tanzania are reliable friends and sincere partners, as President Xi Jinping said when he paid his first visit as president to the African country in 2013.

"In the nearly five decades since we established diplomatic relations, we have built up trust and constantly supported each other. Our political, economic and cultural cooperation has yielded fruitful achievements," he said.

China and Tanzania set up diplomatic ties in 1964. China supported Tanzania's liberation struggle and helped it construct major infrastructure projects.

In the 1970s, China sent experts, specialists and about 15,000 workers to build the strategic Tanzam Railway, also called Tazara. The project gave Zambia, and other landlocked countries, access to the ocean.

Britain, Japan, then West Germany and the United States, as well as the United Nations and the World Bank, had all declined to fund the project, deeming it financially unviable, while China in that time fulfilled its promise to help construct the railway.

Former Tanzanian prime minister Salim Ahmed Salim, also chairman of the Tanzania-China Friendship Promotion Association, said it was a moving story that China did not give up its commitments.

69 Chinese experts and workers died while building the railway, and they were buried in a tomb in Dar es salaam, Tanzania. The youngest of them was 24 years old.

Xi visited the tomb in 2013. "The Chinese experts and workers annotate the great spirit of internationalism with their lives," Xi said. "Their names will never be forgotten in the hearts of the Chinese people, also by the Tanzanian and Zambian friends."

In Tanzania, Chinese people are called comrades.

Xi's African tour is "testimony to the traditional friendship", and the visit to the continent generally indicates the strong ties built over decades.