Construction of the Suez Canal officially began
On this day · 25 April 1859
A single ceremonial pickaxe blow at a future port town began a decade of digging across the Egyptian desert.
On April 25, 1859, digging officially began on the Suez Canal at the site of the future town of Port Said, on Egypt’s Mediterranean coast. The French diplomat Ferdinand de Lesseps, who had secured the concession in 1854, led the inauguration of a waterway meant to splice the Mediterranean and Red Seas.
The work proceeded against fierce political resistance from Britain and the Ottoman Empire, and at enormous human cost. Tens of thousands of Egyptian laborers were conscripted under the corvée forced-labor system until reforms curtailed it in the mid-1860s.
The excavation took roughly a decade to complete.
Water from the two seas finally met in 1869, and the canal opened to navigation on November 17, 1869, stretching about 164 kilometers. By collapsing the long voyage around Africa, it permanently rerouted global trade.
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