Egyptian Khedive Isma'il Pasha presided over lavish opening ceremonies attended by European royalty as ships sailed the 120-mile channel for the first time. Designed by French engineer Ferdinand de Lesseps, the canal cut the sea route between Europe and Asia by thousands of miles, avoiding the long voyage around Africa. It would soon become one of the world's most strategically vital waterways and a flashpoint of imperial rivalry.
Fireworks lit the sky over Port Said as a flotilla of yachts, warships, and dignitaries' vessels—including one carrying the Empress Eugénie of France—glided down the newly cut channel. It had taken roughly 1.5 million Egyptian laborers, many conscripted under harsh corvée conditions, to dig the canal by hand and dredge, and thousands are believed to have died from cholera, exhaustion, and accidents during construction.
The canal instantly made Egypt indispensable to global shipping, slashing the journey from London to Bombay from around 10,000 miles to just over 6,000. Britain, initially skeptical, would within a few years buy a controlling share of the canal company and eventually occupy Egypt outright to secure it, a decision with consequences that echoed through the 20th century, culminating in the 1956 Suez Crisis when Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalized the waterway.
De Lesseps, flush with the canal's success, would later attempt a similar feat in Panama—an effort that ended in bankruptcy, scandal, and thousands more deaths from disease before the Americans finally completed that canal decades later.