Chinese President Xi Jinping will make a landmark visit to four countries including Sri Lanka starting his trip this week from Tajikistan. The official trip will also take him to India and Maldives.

President Xi will begin his trip in Tajikistan where he will attend a meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization on Thursday and Friday.

After Tajikistan, Xi will travel to the Maldives, Sri Lanka and India, on a visit which ends on September 19, the Chinese Foreign Ministry has said, without giving exact dates for when he will be in each country.

The ministry provided no further details, though over the weekend it said that Xi had postponed a trip to Pakistan which had originally been part of his tour due to ongoing unrest in the country.

The Shanghai Cooperation Organization is a six member regional body comprising of Russia, China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. It was formed in 2001 as a regional security bloc to fight threats posed by radical Islam and drug trafficking from neighbouring Afghanistan. India and Pakistan are observer states of SCO while Sri Lanka is a Dialogue Partner.

The trip will be important for the region as a whole because this will be the first time President Xi is visiting all three South Asian countries as head of state.

While China and India have close economic and historical links, there is deep suspicion too, fuelled in part by a festering border dispute.

Asian great-power diplomacy has stirred to life since the rise to power of Indian nationalist Narendra Modi, who announced his intent to play an active role on the world stage by inviting regional leaders to his inauguration in May.

Although Modi seeks pragmatic economic engagement with China, in Tokyo earlier this month he criticized countries with an "expansionist" mindset, a coded jibe against Beijing's assertive behavior in Southeast Asia.

India has been alarmed at the increasing presence of China in countries like Sri Lanka.

Last week, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe began visits to Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, immediately following Narendra Modi’s visit to Japan.