Īladdin is an impoverished young ne'er-do-well, dwelling in 'one of the cities of China'.

The following is a précis of the Burton translation of 1885. The story is often retold with variations. The Sorcerer traps Aladdin in the magic cave. Bottigheimer and Paulo Lemos Horta have argued that Hanna Diyab should be understood as the original author of some of the stories he supplied, and even that several of Diyab's stories (including Aladdin) were partly inspired by Diyab's own life, as there are parallels with his autobiography. As part of his work on the first critical edition of the Nights, Iraq's Muhsin Mahdi has shown that both these manuscripts are 'back-translations' of Galland's text into Arabic. It was purchased by the Bibliothèque Nationale at the end of the nineteenth century. The other is supposed to be a copy Mikhail Sabbagh made of a manuscript written in Baghdad in 1703. One was written by a Syrian Christian priest living in Paris, named Dionysios Shawish, alias Dom Denis Chavis. Payne also records the discovery in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris of two Arabic manuscripts containing Aladdin (with two more of the 'interpolated' tales).

It was included in his volumes ix and x of the Nights, published in 1710, without any mention or published acknowledgment of Hanna's contribution. Galland's diary further reports that his transcription of 'Aladdin' for publication occurred in the winter of 1709–10. According to Galland's diary, he met with Hanna, who had travelled from Aleppo to Paris with celebrated French traveller Paul Lucas, on March 25, 1709. John Payne quotes passages from Galland's unpublished diary: recording Galland's encounter with a Maronite storyteller from Aleppo, Hanna Diyab. Known along with Ali Baba as one of the 'orphan tales', the story was not part of the original Nights collection and has no authentic Arabic textual source, but was incorporated into the book Les mille et une nuits by its French translator, Antoine Galland.

Aladdin old person