Gantimur

Gantimur (Гүн Төмөр; ; Гантимур) was a Daurian tribal chief and military leader. He is the ancestor of Russian princely Gantimurov family. He was born on the Nercha River, not far from what later became Nerchinsk Province.

Born into a family of eastern Siberian tribal chiefs of the siberian-transbaikalian Evenks and the Mongolian Daurian tribes, the details of his early life are unknown. His name is derived from the Mongolian gan ("steel") and tömör ("iron"). He was a relative of the khans of the Jurchen Later Jin dynasty that had come to the Chinese imperial throne with Nurhaci as the first Qing dynasty emperor.

Gantimur initially entered the service of Emperor Shunzhi and led his 8,000 cavalry Evenks into Inner Mongolia as a unit of the Chinese army. Tasked with fighting the Russian Cossacks, who had built a fort in Kumarsk on the Amur River, he defected to them to seek an alliance. In 1667 he returned with his troops to his home near Nerchinsk and put himself into the service of the Russians, along with his relatives and forty elders of his tribe. This opened Transbaikalia and the country on the Amur River to the influence of the Tsardom of Russia. An immediate attempt made by the Qing authorities to secure his return by force was unsuccessful, and special envoys sent by order of the Kangxi Emperor were also unsuccessful persuading Gantimur to come back to the side of the Qing.

In 1684, Gantimur was baptized as a Christian into the Russian Orthodox Church and entered the ranks of the Russian nobility with the title and name of Prince Peter Gantimurov.

The government in Moscow put him in charge of some of the Tungus and Mongol tribes of the newly acquired Transbaikal region. For permanent residence he chose Nerchinsk. In 1685, he was summoned to Moscow, but died on the way to Narym and was buried in Narym.