For two weeks each year visions of perfect Tang dynasty horses, Songera ceramics, and Gandhara Buddhas flit through the heads of collectors in New York. The major auctions of Asian art arrive each March and September, with this month traditionally acting as the tasting course to the spring banquet of Chinese, Indian, Japanese, Korean, Tibetan, Cambodian, and Pakistani art.

But over the past two years, each successive auction – from fall to spring, from New York to Hong Kong to London – has brought record sales of Asian art, one of the most dynamic collecting categories. Asia is being rediscovered once again, not only by the generation of Western collectors that succeeded the gin-and-tonic set, but by the continent’s own inhabitants, who suddenly have money to burn and cultural patrimony to reclaim.

This fall each house has three packed sales. Christie’s expects to sell between $20.9 million and $29.1 million, while Sotheby’s predicts sales of $23-$30 million.

Chinese art alone covers at least 15,000 years, so there’s no lack of regional and historic obsessions to plumb. Tiny but fierce Han warriors? Milky-white Song bowls made in northern Ding kilns? Artfully cracked Gestyle vases? Modern watercolors with daring brushy abstractions? All here. The growing market for Chinese art is being fueled in part by increasingly wealthy mainland collectors eager to claim parts of their pre-Communist heritage, as well as by American collectors fearful of missing out. Last spring the Chinese government asked the U.S. to consider an import ban on works made before 1911. No decision has been reached yet.

Regardless, sales at the New York Chinese art auctions continue to tick upward. The head of Fine Chinese Ceramics and Works of Art at Sotheby’s, Joe-Hynn Yang, points out that last year’s total for the department was $11.7 million, while this March alone saw sales of $13.3 million. He estimates Chinese sales of $12 million this month, plus an anticipated $5 million for a separate sale called Arts of the Buddha. Christie’s March sales of Chinese art were $13.4 million, a $3.2 million increase over the previous year; the estimate for their sale this month is $9.8 million to $13.8 million.

While the mainland Chinese collectors are definitely a force, Mr. Yang said, “their pocketbooks are a little constrained by the convertibility of their currency, so other people active are those whose economies are tied into China, such as Taiwan, Hong Kong, and America.” And while Chinese collectors typically focus on anything Imperial, other buyers are more catholic in taste.

At Sotheby’s these “new emperors,” as Yang describes them, can linger over bronzes dating to the beginnings of the Western Zhou dynasty in the 12th and 11th centuries B.C.E. A rare rectangular bronze wine vessel with cover is estimated at $350,000 to $450,000. Two Ming vases come with solid provenances. One, decorated with lychee and loquat clusters, is from the estate of Laurence Rockefeller, who used it as a lamp covering for years. It is estimated at $300,000 to $400,000.The other, once owned by renowned collector J.M. Hu, features finely articulated scenes of a waterbearer laboring before a scholar astride a horse. It is estimated at $100,000 to $200,000.

Christie’s also has plenty of ancient bronzes, Ming vases, and Tang horses the height of a small child. But ceramics look especially strong. Several dozen luminous porcelains on offer were consigned by Maryland doctor Ignacio Rodriguez and his wife, Lolita, who started collecting Chinese porcelains in the 1980s with an emphasis on modern-looking, monochromatic Qing and Ming dynasty works. A small 17th century brush washer, for example, boasts a dusky peach glaze and iris shaped low curving shape. It is estimated at $50,000 to $70,000.

“The field has changed a lot in the past 25 years,” Dr. Rodriguez said. “Knowledge has grown exponentially.” He bought a rare 18th-century Ru-type, eggshell-blue brush washer from the sale of the J.M. Hu collection in 1985 for approximately $8,000. Now it is estimated at $50,000 to $70,000.

Relative to other collecting areas, “porcelain from the Ming and Qing periods has gone up,” Christie’s department head, Athena Zonars, said. “It’s always been a passion of the Chinese to collect great porcelain, and as they become wealthier, they continue that interest.”

The strength of the Indian art market, on the other hand, lies in contemporary works. “There’s more interest in modern and contemporary art, not only Chinese but South and Southeast Asian,” the John H. Foster curator of traditional Asian art at the Asia Society, Adriana Proser, said. “Some of the interest in contemporary is driven by people wary of buying traditional art, as well as their personal interest.”

Many wealthy Indians grew up with the 20th-century artists represented in the sales, such as Francis Newton Souza and Maqbool Fida Husain. To cater to Indian collectors, Christie’s this month is opening a Mumbai office headed by Ganieve Grewal, a former Christie’s specialist with established connections in Mumbai.

The highest estimates in the Indian and Southeast Asian sales at both houses are for 20th-century paintings. Tyeb Mehta’s “Celebration” (1995) set a record for contemporary Indian art when it sold for $317,500 at Christie’s in September 2002. The house is banking on another Mehta work, the graphical 1997 painting “Mahisasura” to bring $600,000 to $800,000, which would match the entire $650,000 total of Christie’s first New York sale of modern and contemporary Indian art in 2000. At Sotheby’s, V.S. Gaitonde’s Turner-esque abstract untitled painting from 1961 is one of the priciest lots, estimated at $150,000 to $200,000. The entire Indian and Southeast Asian sale is estimated to bring $6 to $8 million, while Christie’s projects sale totals of $7.6 million to $10.7 million.

Both houses still feature plenty of multi-armed, carnally inclined Hindu deities. The elephantine god of knowledge, Ganesha, looks particularly benevolent and luminous in a 12th-century marble sculpture at Christie’s, estimated at $60,000 to $80,000.At Sotheby’s the same figure can purchase a striking sandstone sculpture of a 10thcentury celestial goddess, whose headdress is a mango tree and whose abundant breasts seem to promise opulent times ahead.