The legend of The Twelve Sisters or The Twelve Ladies, known as Nang Sip Song (นางสิบสอง) or as Phra Rot Meri (พระรถเมรี) in Thai and រឿងភ្នំនាងកង្រី Puthisen Neang KongRei in Cambodia, a Southeast Asian folktale, and also an apocryphal Jātaka Tale, the Rathasena Jātaka of the Paññāsa Jātaka collection. It is one of the stories of the previous lives of Buddha in which Rathasena, the son of one of the twelve women, is the bodhisattva.
Background
The story of the Twelve Sisters is part of the folk tradition of certain countries in Southeast Asia such as Thailand, Cambodia and Laos and the folktales derived from it come in different versions, often under different titles depending from the country. This legend was also brought to Malaysia by the Malaysian Siamese where it became popular among the Malaysian Chinese community.
It is a long story about the life of twelve sisters abandoned by their parents and adopted by an ogress (Hinduism: Rakshasa)] (Lao Sundara; Khmer: Santhamea(យក្សសន្ធមារ); Thai: Santhumala) disguised as a beautiful lady. The conclusion is the sad love story about the only surviving son of the twelve sisters, Rathasena (Thai: Phra Rotthasen (พระรถเสน); Khmer: Puthisen (ពុទ្ធិសែន) or Rithisen; Lao: Putthasen) with Manora (Thai: Meri เมรี; Khmer: KongRei (នាងកង្រី); Lao: Kankari; ), the adopted daughter of ogress Sundara. At the end both died together upon the long and lonely shore of a lake.
Thai version
A long time ago, there was a rich merchant and his beautiful wife who lived happily in a big house. Despite their good fortune, the couple didn't have any children. One day, they went together to a shrine and made an offering of twelve banana hands to a tree spirit. Not long thereafter the wife became pregnant and the rich man wished with all his might that the child would be a boy, but his wife gave birth to a girl. His wife, however, conceived again and again. She became pregnant twelve times and each time she had a daughter. By that time his business started to go wrong for him since the ships that took his goods to sell in another country were robbed several times. Finally the rich merchant ended up borrowing a lot of money from his friends trying to fix his business problems. Yet, no matter what he did, his family kept getting poorer.
The former rich man found it hard having so many mouths to feed. So he made a plan to abandon his daughters in the forest. He hid this plan from his wife but his youngest daughter named Phao heard about it. When their father left them alone in the deep forest, the twelve girls were able to find their way back home thanks to their younger sister who had left marks in the path. But their father tried again and this time they were not able to find their way back home. They spent days walking deeper and deeper into the forest and became very hungry. Their father had given them twelve packets of rice, but when they opened them they found out that eleven of them were filled with sand and only one had rice in it. They shared that little rice and ate it crying, lamenting their misfortune. Wandering aimlessly the twelve girls came to a lake, where they tried to catch fish to satiate their hunger. Each of the sisters succeeded in catching a fish and eleven of them playfully poked the eyes of their fish with sharp twigs, except for the youngest one who poked only one eye.
Finally they arrived to the Yaksha kingdom, where an ogress named Santhumala saw the exhausted and emaciated girls resting under a tree and decided to adopt them. The ogress transformed herself into a human being, a pleasant-looking woman, and brought the twelve sisters to her home. For many years she treated them as her own daughters and under her care the twelve girls grew up into beautiful young women.
One day, while Santhumala was away hunting, the twelve sisters met an old man who told them that Santhumala was not a human, but an ogress who liked to eat young women like them. So they fled from the ogre kingdom and wandered for days until they arrived to a clear river where they took a bath to refresh themselves. The local king saw the twelve ladies playing in the water and fell in love with them. So he brought them to his palace and married the twelve sisters.