The Mombasa-Nairobi Standard Gauge Railway, due to be put into operation next year, will adopt Chinese standards and use Chinese equipment, making it one of the best such lines in the world, a top Chinese official said on Wednesday.

"If the Tanzania-Zambia Railway, constructed in the 1970s by China, is a railway of friendship, the Mombasa-Nairobi Standard Gauge Railway is more than that," Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi said of the 472-kilometer railway costing $3.8 billion.

"It is a railway of win-win cooperation, prosperity, ecological protection and common development," Wang said in Nairobi, Kenya, during his visit to the country.