Stealing Beauty.

Ruthless art thieves are rapidly stripping Asia's cultural sites of precious artifacts and selling them to smugglers and dealers who hawk them in the West. Breaking into these tombs and stealing the national treasures they hold are illegal. But the lure is too great for many, especially because one major haul, sold to a smuggler, can equal a year's farming income. The UN says that the global antiquities-smuggling chain rivals the drug and arms trades in scope and scale. The trade in Asian relics--whether obtained legally 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. 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. No country has lost so much so quickly as Cambodia, whose jungles hid cities built by the mysterious Angkor Empire between the 9th and 14th centuries. Michel Tranet, the Undersecretary of State at Cambodia's Ministry of Culture and Fine Arts, is determined to protect Cambodia's heritage and stop the flow of Khmer relics into the art market. INSET: Big Business.