It has muddy cracks at the bottom, but the wooden figure of a woman with her hands cupped around her face is exquisitely made enough to catch attention of a customer in a souvenir store in Hanoi, capital of Vietnam.

The shopkeeper who approaches the customer says the 40cm tall figure is 100 years old, but is selling at a ''bargain'' price of 800,000 dong (around US$53).

He says it is the cheapest of its kind in his shop. Next to the statue, in fact, is a slightly bigger figure of a man beating a drum, but that has already been sold for 1.2 million dong (US$79).

For ethnic minorities in the Central Highlands, however, there can be no price tag for these statues. The shopkeeper may not admit it, but chances are they were spirited away from Vietnam's mountainous central provinces, where such wooden statues guard graves and tombs.

''Almost every day, people claim to have lost their statues,'' Y Sieu Djoai, a Daklak province artisan who makes such figures for a living.

Theft of statues

An officer from Daklak's Department of Culture and Information says, ''About 100 statues have been stolen since the beginning of this year, and a good deal were lost in previous years.''

Officials there think they know where the missing statues have wound up: in souvenir shops in Vietnamese cities like Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh City, Hue and Danang, where they are being snapped up by eager tourists at exorbitant prices.

Two thieves caught in southern Gia Lai province admitted as much during their recent court trials, saying that they had been told to get as many as they could of the graveyard artifacts ''because they are very popular with tourists''.

According to the thieves, they would usually chat up locals to find out where the cemeteries are, and then wait for nightfall to steal the statues.

Rituals for forgiveness

But the disappearance of more and more statues in the highlands is more than upsetting people there.

Explains Y Sieu Djoai: ''The statues are very precious to us. If a family loses one, it must hold a ceremony in front of the funeral house to beg the dead for forgiveness. Otherwise, they believe that bad things will happen to them.''

The Central Highlands peoples believe that when someone dies, his soul goes to the spirit world, where it lives until it is allowed to return to earth in human form again.

The wooden statues are considered to be guardians and companions of the dead while they are in spirit form, but they are also supposed to reflect the deep love of the living for their dead.

Hiding under thick canopies of foliage up in the mountains, the statues that come in various forms have long been part of the region's wild beauty.

Although associated with death, they nevertheless illustrate the local people's simple acknowledgement of the beauty of life and the surreal worlds connecting the living and the dead.

A vanishing craft

Each statue is carved during a grave-leaving festival, which symbolises the total breaking off of relations between the living and the dead. To this day, the locals rely on traditional artists like Y Sieu Djoai to make the wooden sentinels of the dead.

The images — which can range from people at work, to cars or even planes, to animals — are carved from local wood with the use of just a knife or some other sharp kitchen utensil.

But elders and officials there say thieves and insensitive tourists are not the only problems they have these days.

They say the art of making the wooden sculptures is disappearing as well, even though woodcarving is supposed to be a vital part of the cultures of the ethnic Xe Dang, E de, Giarai, Bana and M'nong peoples.

Few among the young in the highlands are taking up the art of woodcarving, much less making the grave statues. Dinh Y Dep, T'ra village patriarch in Gia Lai, laments, ''Our youngsters favour new things and are lax about (continuing) traditions.''

Y Sieu Djoai admits that his son, Y Kyun, fails to see the importance of seeing to it that the art does not die. To Y Kyun, 21, an ornate tomb means little. He says, ''Why should we decorate a tomb? Death is the end.''

Not surprisingly, Y Kyun is not following the footsteps of his artist-father. Instead, he is working as a tour guide.

Dwindling wood supply

The theft of the old statues has thus become all the more painful for the Central Highlands people, who fear that they will soon be without any wooden guard for the dead at all.

Another reason is that the supply of good wood to make the statues is dwindling.

Says an old artisan: ''The statues used to be made of a certain kind of wood, which could last a very long time. Unfortunately, this wood has recently run out and been replaced by another kind of wood with much poorer durability.''

As a result, there are now statues that have succumbed to the elements and are now broken or rotten. — IPS