The main protagonists are Prince Aphai Mani, the mermaid, and the Pisue Samutra; a female ogress who can transmute herself into a beautiful girl.

The mermaid daughter took Aphai and Sin Samudr to Koh Kaeo Phitsadan (lit: Bizarre Crystal Island) where a (ruesee)(ฤาษี: hermit) warded the ogress away.

Aphai and Sin Samudr asked to join the ship in order to get home, but the ogress saw them and got infuriated, calling forth storms and spirits, attacking them, and killing King Silarat.

The captain of the pirates, Surang (สุหรัง) wanted to take Suwanmali as his wife, so he tried to kill Sin Samudr multiple times.

While he was still living in the island, a hermit taught him magic and helped him tame a wild dragon horse before naming it Ma Nil Mangkorn (ม้านิลมังกร).

Sud Sakhon and Ma Nil Mangkorn traveled together, defeating evil spirits and monsters along the way, before meeting a naked hermit (ชีเปลือย) who took him in as his apprentice before tricking the poor boy and pushing him down a cliff.

Sud Sakhon, who had been passed out for three days and was starving, told his horse to quickly go ask the hermit by the Koh Kaeo Phitsadan for help.

The hermit came to rescue Sud Sakhon from the cliff and lectured him, telling the boy to never trust humans as you never know what their true intentions may be.

A few years later, joined by his adoptive siblings, Saowakon (เสาวคนธ์) and Hasachai (หัสไชย), Sud Sakhon continued his journey to find his long lost father.

At the end of the war, Aphai divided the land equally among all of his heirs before becoming a monk, joined by his two wives: Suwanmali and Laweng.

The epic tale of Phra Aphai Mani is a truly massive work of poetry in klon suphap (Thai: กลอนสุภาพ).

Sunthorn Phu, however, originally intended to end the story at the point where Phra Aphai abdicates the throne and retires into the wood.

Today, the abridged version - i.e. his original 64 samut-thai volumes, totaling 25,098 couplets of poetry - is regarded as the authoritative text of the epic.

Sunthorn Phu also writes about a mechanical music player at the time when a gramophone or a self-playing piano was yet to be invented.

Also, unlike other classical Thai epic poems, Phra Aphai Mani depicts various exploits of white mercenaries and pirates which reflected the ongoing colonization of Southeast Asia in the early 19th Century.

European colonial powers had been expanding their influence and presence into Southeast Asia when Sunthorn Phu was composing Phra Aphai Mani.

[1] In a literary sense, however, Phra Aphai Mani has been suggested by other Thai academics as being inspired by Greek epics and Persian literature, notably the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Argonauts, and One Thousand and One Nights.

[citation needed] Pii Sue Samut ("the sea butterfly"), a love-struck female titan who kidnaps the hero, is reminiscent of the nymph Calypso.

In addition, Nang Laweng's bewitching beauty, so captivating it drives nations to war, seems to match the reputation of Helen of Troy.

Others have suggested that Nang Laweng may have been inspired by a story of a Christian princess, as recounted in Persia's Thousand and One Nights, who falls in love with a Muslim king.

[citation needed] All of this suggests that Sunthorn Phu was a Siamese bard with a bright and curious mind who absorbed, not only the knowledge of contemporary seafaring and Western inventions, but also stories of Greek classical epics from learned Europeans.

He became the first Thai writer to draw inspirations from Western literary sources and produces an epic based, loosely, upon an amalgamation of those myths and legends.

Thus, rather than writing with a political motive, Sunthorn Phu might simply have wanted to equal his literary prowess to the most famed poets and writers of the West.

[citation needed] In some regions in Thailand, such as the Ko Samet island and Puek Tian beach, there are statues erected which are related to the Phra Aphai Mani story.