The African Who Measured The Great Wall of China

 The African Who Measured 

The Great Wall of China

Left: Portrait of a young Gannibal;
Right: The Great Wall of China, circa 1750, Dutch school
(Source: Leiden University Libraries)

The Cameroonian military engineer Ibrahim Gannibal (c. 1696-1781) was once instructed to measure one of the wonders of the ancient world - the Great Wall of China.

Gannibal lived in Russia for most of his life.

For us to understand and to truly appreciate the weight of Gannibal's accomplishment, we must first take a look at just how much the people of Europe understood about the wall.

A section of the Great Wall on the Hanging Cliffs
leading up to Jiayu Pass
Photo by Aine Hickey
(Source: Wikipedia Commons)

Although the wall was around since at least the third century B.C., no European had seen the Great Wall of China with their own eyes until the early 1600s. 

The first on record is Portuguese Jesuit Bento de Góis (1562-1607), who reached the northwestern Jiayu Pass from India in 1618. The account of his travels is recorded by the priest Ivan Petlin, who first led Jesuit missionaries into China.

Portrait of Gannibal from the
painting"The Battle of Lesnaya"
1724
(Credit: Dieudonné Gnammankou)

Gannibal was quite a success story in 18th century Russia. He went from being a slave to a ranking officer in the Russian military. He was also the object of Emperor Peter's greatest admiration. It is therefore unsurprising that by the time of the emperor's death in 1725, Gannibal had many enemies. One of these was the emperor's right hand man Alexander Menshikov (1673-1729). 

A detail of Alexander Danilovich Menshikov's
1698 portrait by Michiel van Musscher
Collection of Y. Weisman, Munich, Germany
(Source: Wikipedia Commons)

Menshikov had long resented Gannibal, jealous of the attention and preferential treatment that Gannibal received from the tsar in light of his own misfortunes. Menshikov was embroiled in allegations of fraud under Peter's reign. British historian Simon Sebag Montefiore notes, in his book The Romanovs 1613–1918, that on one ocassion, Menshikov was punched twice by the tsar, once in the nose and once on the side of the head, after Tsar Peter saw Menshikov dancing with his sword still on. (At the time, this was considered highly rude and offensive.) Meanwhile, the tsar never missed an opportunity to tell the people of Russia that if his dear Gannibal could be so exceptional, they had no excuses.

Menshikov would have no competitors. As the de-facto head of state for the next two years, Menshikov decided that he would take advantage of his position to keep the aspiring African as far from the circle of government as possible.

Menshikov cooked up a scheme to exile Gannibal to Siberia, where most of Tsarist Russia's political prisoners and pariahs were sent. In order to carry out this scheme, Menshikov only had to convince Gannibal that he was continuing his training. He appointed Gannibal to the leadership of a garrison from Tobolsk, a settlement east of the Ural Mountains, with orders to "measure the Chinese wall."

To illustrate the length that Menshikov went to rid himself of Gannibal, I have included two maps below, which show the distance from the capital in St. Petersburg to Tobolsk 4,000 miles away.

Location of St. Petersburg
(Source: OpenStreetMap/Wikipedia)

Location of Tobolsk
(Source: OpenStreetMap/Wikipedia)

I discovered this historical tidbit while reading the seventh volume of the Collected Works of A. S. Pushkin. The original text was published under the heading "The Beginning of a New Autobiography," and was written in 1836. 

After I conducting a search for some information on traces of the Great Wall of China in Southern Russia, read that portions of the wall do, in fact, extend into Russia. I also found a 2017 news story from the UK's Express about the recent discovery of a "mysterious Great Wall of Siberia built by [an] unknown civilisation 2000 years ago." The article explains that this wall was actually a series of six parallel walls.

Here's more:

Standing up to 26ft tall, and 33ft wide, the impressive fortifications are now overgrown with grass and trees and barely visible to the naked eye. 

Could this be the "Chinese wall" that Gannibal was sent to examine?

This may be further proof that Gannibal was ahead of his time.

In any case, Gannibal did not remain in Siberia for too long.

Gannibal's great grandson, Pushkin, tels what happened next.

Ganibal stayed there [in Siberia] for a while, got bored and arbitrarily returned to Petersburg, learning about the fall of Menshikov...

When he discovered the fate of his associates in the Dolgorukov family under successive administrations (most notably Vasily Vladimirovich Dolgorukov and Alexei Gregorovich Dolgorouky who were both sentenced to exile for challenging the status quo), Gannibal stole away to the village of Revel, where Pushkin says, 'he lived ten years in perpetual concern.'

Gannibal went on to advance several ranks under Emperor Elizabeth from major to major general and beyond. Elizabeth granted him him several villages in the provinces of Pskov and Petersburg, including his own supply of serfs. For some time, Gannibal also served as chief commandant in one of these villages, now the great city of Tallinn in Estonia.

Menshikov's ten-year roadblock did not entirely preclude Gannibal from his path to prosperity. As a matter of fact, I am inclined to believe that Gannibal's study of the "Chinese wall" provided him with some practical material to experiment with in his own designs of Russian buildings. Among other projects he undertook during this time, Gannibal was responsible for the construction of a fortress, which British journalist Hugh Barnes says, was supposed to ward off the Chinese. His team of engineers, surveyors, and legal experts was also commissioned to help resolve a border dispute between Russia and Sweden.

But, despite all of his accomplishments, the evidence demonstrates that Gannibal was never the same after his banishment. Pushkin wrote:

Until his death he could not hear the ringing of a bell without trepidation. 

The great fear his ancestor felt until his dying day prevented Pushkin from access to Gannibal's personal notes, which would have doubtless inspired his own poetry in an even more marked way than it already did.

In a fit of fearful panic to which he was subject, he ordered them to be burned with him along with other precious papers.

This is a classic example of how hatred breeds fear and fear breeds ignorance. Imagine the wealth of information that is lost to us today - all because some jerkball prince was jealous of a former slave over 20 years his junior!

For those interested in reading more on Gannibal from Pushkin, an electronic edition of Pushkin's autobiography "The Pedigree of the Pushkins and the Hannibals" is available online through the official website of the Russian Virtual Library.