JOHN STANMEYER/VII FOR TIME

Enforcers: Tranet stopped a tourist from smuggling this buddha out of Cambodia

Spirited Away
	In India, Cambodia and China, ruthless art thieves are stripping cultural sites of precious artifacts, then shifting them to smugglers and dealers who hawk them overseas. Hannah Beech tracks down the players in a shadowy international trade that is robbing Asia's proud civilizations of their heritage

Posted Monday, October 13, 2003; 21:00 HKT
The citizens of Xiaoli village move lazily, a languor born of chronic underemployment. They're farmers by tradition, but exorbitant taxes have leeched any profitability from their profession. So, most hot summer days, the local peasants sit on concrete stoops, pant legs hiked up to their thighs, fanning themselves with the latest propaganda broadsheet from Beijing and waiting for dusk to fall. For it is only at night that Xiaoli comes alive.

Underneath this sad little village in Henan province is the rich legacy of five millenniums of Chinese history. The nearby city of Luoyang was the capital of at least nine dynasties, and the fields of today's peasants are littered with imperial tombs. Many still hold impossibly valuable works of art buried centuries ago. Breaking into these tombs and stealing the national treasures they hold is illegal, of course. But the lure is too great for many, especially because one major haul, sold to a smuggler, can equal a year's farming income. "For kids here, tomb raiding is just like going to the bar," says Little Su, a Xiaoli doctor who put himself through medical school with the spoils of treasure hunts beneath the fields around his home. "There's nothing else to do. If you're bored one night, someone will say, hey, let's go find a tomb." The rewards of these amateur and often dangerous nocturnal expeditions are evident in Little Su's wardrobe—he's long since traded in baggy peasant garb for snazzy Playboy shirts and gleaming loafers—and in the incongruous mishmash of mud-brick shacks and shiny, white-tiled houses with satellite dishes lining the streets of Xiaoli. "You can tell who raided the best tombs just by looking at their houses," says Little Su. The richest citizens even have big-screen TVs and video-game machines. Little Su's favorite game? Tomb Raider.

Archaeologists like to joke that the pillaging of temples and other ancient sites is the world's second oldest profession. After all, civilizations' treasures have throughout history been looted and relooted by cat burglars and conquistadors alike. Grave robbing was even an officially recognized job description in China's Three States period during the 2nd century. But what used to be a trickle of plundered treasures has become a flood in recent years. Villagers like Little Su, who see nothing wrong in converting an untapped resource into a few modern consumer appliances, are merely the first link in a global antiquities-smuggling chain that the United Nations says rivals the drug and arms trades in scope and scale. Says Kathryn Tubb, conservator of the Institute of Archaeology at the University College of London: "It's commonly accepted by those of us who work in the field that 80% to 90% of the material on the market is illicit."

	I risked my LIFE for those STATUES. The excitement gives our lives some MEANING. —FENG, Chinese tomb raider

The trade in Asian relics—whether legally obtained or looted—is booming, driven by demand from wealthy Western and Eastern collectors seeking to decorate their SoHo lofts and Shanghai penthouses with everything from ancient buddha heads to Khmer sculptures. In China alone, some 200 auction houses, most dealing in antiquities, have opened in the past decade. During art auctions in London this summer, two of the brightest sales in an otherwise unspectacular season were prized Asian objects, both of them legitimately acquired: a Chinese Qianlong-era jade vase from a private collection was expected by Bonham's to sell for about $100,000 and was gaveled off at $280,000; at a Sotheby's sale, a private collector's calligraphy-brush washer from the Southern Song dynasty sold to a Taiwanese gallery for an astounding $1.2 million.

The global appetite for such relics has sparked a lawless gold rush across Asia. In the past year alone, Indian police busted a smuggling ring that allegedly stripped hundreds of temples and monuments of sculptures and frescoes, then sent them on to be sold to collectors in the U.S. and Europe; Cambodian cops seized several truckloads of priceless Khmer sculptures crudely ripped from archaeological sites in Banteay Meanchey province; and Chinese officials uncovered the theft of 158 religious statuary from a collection loaned to a museum in Chengde by the Forbidden City's Palace Museum in Beijing. Over the past five years, at least 220,000 ancient Chinese tombs have been broken into, according to estimates from China's National Cultural Relics Bureau.

The dramatic ransacking of Baghdad's national museum during the Iraq war may have grabbed headlines earlier this year, but the consistent, widespread and largely unremarked looting of Asia is far more damaging. "There is a feeling that Asia is filled with endless supplies of cultural relics," says He Shuzhong, head of Cultural Heritage Watch, a nongovernmental cultural-preservation group in Beijing. "But if the looting continues at this pace, we'll soon have nothing left to remind us of our glorious past. Baghdad was just a few weeks of destruction—our heritage is experiencing a major blow every week, every month, every year."

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