The Widow Twankey first appeared on stage in 1861. At that time daily papers listed on Boxing Day dozens of novelty-stuffed pantomimes. But as far as I can make out, Aladdin, or, The Wonderful Scamp, in which the widow, played by James Rogers, made her entrance, was not a Christmas pantomime but a burlesque, for which the Strand theatre was celebrated. She was first spelled Twankay, being named after a popular variety of green tea.
The origins of the tea’s name (spelled twanky on its first appearance in print in 1840), are as obscure as Chinese geography was then. It was attributed to a dialect version of two streams, a town or a region. In the pantomimic context it is notable that Twankay was Chinese in character, although in (the French version of) the tale from the Arabian Nights from which it derives, all the characters have Arabic names. Aladdin means ‘nobility of the faith’, the faith in question being Islam.
Twankey was easily taken up as a silly name in English because it fitted in with words such as twankydillo, used in folk songs as a refrain.
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