Advertisement
Advertisement
Books and literature
Get more with myNEWS
A personalised news feed of stories that matter to you
Learn more
The 1992 Disney cartoon ‘Aladdin’ had no trace of its Chinese roots.

Is Aladdin really Chinese? How Hollywood invented the tale’s Middle Eastern identity

  • The original story was set in China and added to the first European version of the Arabian Nights folk story collection in the 19th century
  • When Hollywood put the story on the silver screen from the 1920s onwards, it became more Middle Eastern

“Aladdin”, the classic tale of the plucky boy and his magic lamp, is known and loved by children and adults across the globe.

In books and films, Aladdin is often depicted wearing a turban or fez and baggy, Middle Eastern-style harem pants, flying on his magic carpet with his princess, who is dressed in what could pass as a belly dancer’s outfit.

Why Indians owe most of their genes to migrants from what’s now Iran

So it may come as a surprise to many to learn that Aladdin and his princess might actually be Chinese. In the original story, Aladdin is born to a poor tailor in “the capital of one of China’s vast and wealthy kingdoms”.

The Chinese setting of the story, however, has in most recent iterations, notably the Disney animated film of 1992, been almost entirely rewritten. And in Disney’s new live-action film, due for release in May, the omission is likely to be perpetuated.

Pages from the first European edition of The One Thousand and One Nights.

Even before its release, the film – and how Aladdin is portrayed in it – set social media aflutter. Rumours circulated online that Disney had difficulty finding an actor to play Aladdin, which critics said perfectly signalled Hollywood’s diversity problem. Commentators pointed to Bollywood, the world’s biggest film industry, in which hundreds of talented actors who could pass for Aladdin sing and dance in thousands of films each year, as an obvious pool of talent.

But there was little discussion of being true to the original story or finding a Chinese actor to play the part.

In years past, Aladdin’s Chinese aspects have even been amplified: in book illustrations of the Victorian era, when the craze for Chinoiserie was at its peak, Aladdin sports a Manchurian queue and Chinese slippers, and the architecture features distinctly Chinese pagodas.

An early 1900s illustration from Aladdin. Illustration: Alamy

Reacting negatively to China’s growing role in global trade, on the other hand, British pantomimes in mid-Victorian times sarcastically renamed Aladdin characters after types of tea. But now China seems to have disappeared completely.

“‘Aladdin’ is a shape-shifter, a paradox: it’s one of the most instantly familiar stories, and also one of the least known. It has survived by changing and reinventing itself – the Disney film is just one in a long line of reincarnations that depart quite radically from the original story,” says French-Syrian writer Yasmine Seale, whose new translation of the original tale was published by WW Norton last November.

What to read in 2019 – Haruki Murakami, Margaret Atwood and R.F. Kuang’s second novel

Indeed, Aladdin’s setting has strayed even beyond China and the Middle East: in a Japanese translation published in 1888, the characters are depicted in European dress, as was typical of illustrators at the time.

What qualifies as “original” in “Aladdin” is complicated, anyway. The story was first written down in the 18th century by Frenchman Antoine Galland in the first European version of “The One Thousand and One Nights”, the book of Middle Eastern folk tales also known as “Arabian Nights”. Arabic manuscripts predating Galland’s by hundreds of years exist for most of the tales in “One Thousand and One Nights”, but not for “Aladdin” (nor, incidentally, the other popular stories about Sinbad and Ali Baba).

A 19th century wood engraving from The Book of One Thousand and One Nights. Illustration: Alamy

Galland claimed he heard the tale from a Syrian traveller, Hanna Diyab, whom he met in Paris.

The story was long thought to be Galland’s invention, but the veracity of his claim was assured after Diyab’s diaries were recently discovered in the Vatican Library. How much the story is a construction of Diyab’s, or was reinterpreted by Galland – or both – is debated by scholars.

“The text I have translated is the first written version, but even that is a slippery thing,” says Seale. “As a story told by a Syrian to a Frenchman, each of whom was fascinated by the other’s culture, it can’t be pinned down to one language or literary tradition.”

And while the story clearly states the setting is China, Aladdin’s ethnicity is never explicitly mentioned. The characters’ names, including the princess’ – Badr al-Budur (not Jasmine, as in Disney’s animation) – the use of “sultan” instead of “emperor”, and references to Islamic practices such as evening prayers, give the tale an overtly Middle Eastern flavour.

‘Aladdin’ in the 19th century was set in China. Illustration: Alamy

“The story might be set in China, but this is just a narrative strategy,” says Wen-chin Ouyang, professor of Arabic and Comparative Literature at SOAS University of London. “The tale is certainly more Islamic than Chinese. But I don’t think that readers would interpret or understand the story and its themes of responsibility and commitment to the ones you love any differently if it was set elsewhere.”

Vignettes of 1930s Shanghai, and the famous and infamous characters that inhabited it

Disney’s ‘Aladdin’ is not, in fact, based on Galland’s original text, but is a product of the long tradition of movies based on ‘One Thousand and One Nights’, which starts with the 1924 silent film “The Thief of Baghdad”, that freely adapted characters and settings from different stories within the book.

Alexander Korda then produced an Oscar-winning British remake in 1940. Disney’s animation takes Korda’s classic as its inspiration, although setting the tale in the fictional city of Agrabah, Arabia, instead of Baghdad.

“Apparently, Disney’s ‘Aladdin’ was also meant to be set in Baghdad,” writes Arafat A. Razzaque, a PhD candidate of history and Middle Eastern studies at Harvard University. “But as the US was bombing Iraq during the first Gulf War at the time, Disney changed the setting to a fictional city to avoid awkward associations with the Baghdad of Saddam Hussein.”

‘Aladdin Discovers the Lamp’ from circa 1930. Illustration: Alamy

Many children’s books now depict Aladdin similarly as entirely Middle Eastern. “There is a distinct tradition of filmmaking, and, as we have seen with Shakespeare plays and Jane Austen novels, there is a two-way influence between books and films, cinema and television,” says Ouyang.

Interestingly, in a 2015 US poll of 532 Republicans, 30 per cent said they would support bombing Agrabah. There is, it seems, also a two-way influence between fiction and the real world.

Post