For those of us who had Walt Disney as a primary caregiver, Herter's ornate Pilgun Yoon isn't recognizable as a portrayal of Aladdin, the chipper Levantine boy in the animated blockbuster.

In the original story, Aladdin was Chinese, and portrayals like Herter's Pilgun Yoon were the norm for the time. Although it is interesting to note that in an illustrated Japanese version from 1888,  the characters dress like Europeans, a style which would be exotic to an East Asian audience.

This is at least the second Herter painting of the folklore character Aladdin, following one which he displayed at New York's Kit Kat Club decades earlier. The name of the Korean actor hired by Herter to pose as Aladdin and pictured here in Qing dynasty threads, has unfortunately been lost in translation several times over. As early as 1924 the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts mistakenly gave the name of the actor in this portrait as "Pilgrim Yoon" in a catalogue, and other publishers repeated this error until as late as 1989. Embarrassingly, as of May 2020,  the Smithsonian Institution still calls this man "Pilgrim Yoon" on its website, and dates the work as from 1824. Herter, of course, was not born until 1871. Your tax dollars hard at work, folks. 

The story of Aladdin is a remarkable "shapeshifter," to borrow the term of the French-Syrian writer Yasmine Seale, who recently finished a new translation of the story. "Aladdin" is often known to scholars as an "orphan tale," because it was originally tacked onto the labyrinthine Les mille et une nuits, contes arabes traduits en français ("The Thousand and One Nights, Arab stories translated into French"), published between 1704 and 1717 by Antoine Galland. Galland borrowed these stories from an Arabic version of the Syrian recension of the Thousand and One Nights (Arabic: أَلْفُ لَيْلَةٍ وَلَيْلَةٌ‎, ʾAlf Laylah wa-Laylah), whose own origins are mostly unknown to scholars, although they may have emerged from an Indian influence, and its texts date back to an old piece of Egyptian scrap paper from 879 CE. Along with "Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves" and the story of Sinbad, the hoop-earring-wearing stand-up comed—err, sailor, "Aladdin" has no authentic Arabic textual source, which raises the bizarre but unsurprising possibility that the most famous story about "the Orient" in the European imagination was composed by Galland himself. Galland certainly worked the thing over, as you would, consciously or unconsciously, while playing "telephone" on the schoolyard, but it is most likely that he did actually hear the story from a Syrian Maronite storyteller from Aleppo, Hanna Diyab. 

In the real "Aladdin," I'm sorry to report, there was no Robin Williams, no witty banter from a parrot, and, instead of the nefarious Jaffar, there was a Maghrebi magician and his brother. There was no Princess Jasmine, either: her name is بدر البدور‎ Badr ul-Budūr, "full moon of full moons," which, in my opinion, is a lot more poetic. In his macabre 1916 poem, Wallace Stevens referred to her by her Anglicized name, writing, "Out of the tomb, we bring Badroulbadour/ Within our bellies, we her chariot." 

The use of Arabic in a Chinese setting makes sense, given that Arabs have lived in China for a very long time. The mostly Zoroastrian Persian Sasanian empire is the setting of The Thousand and One Nights. At its apex it ruled all the way from China through the Maghreb, which is where the villain magically transports Aladdin. (Not on a magic carpet, by the way.)