Bangkok - A turquoise sash on a wedding dress was the only streak of color visible in the blackened and charred shops housed inside a giant movie theater complex in downtown Bangkok. Acrid smoke rose past the cinema's large mural of the masks of comedy and tragedy.

Summoning any emotion was difficult for the owner of a gutted clothing store as he looked at the destruction.

"I can't even cry. I don't even know how I feel," said Viroj Sinthaveelert, standing on a carpet of broken glass inside the burned shell of the Siam Cinema building, which was torched by rioters on Wednesday. "This is the biggest shock of my life."

Peace was largely restored in the city Thursday, a day after a military crackdown on anti-government protesters triggered rioting in which 39 buildings were burned.

Among them were high-end properties like the Siam Cinema and the CentralWorld shopping mall, where Thais loved to bring their families.

Thursday was a day for counting what was lost in the mayhem _ and what it will take to rebuild and return that special buzz that made Bangkok one of Southeast Asia's favored destinations for shoppers, tourists and business travelers.

Officials at Center One, another gutted mall of 300 shops, estimated damage of at least 1 billion baht (about $31 million) and said 1,000 people were unemployed.

Fire damaged the first floor of the Stock Exchange of Thailand, and the damage to municipal public property was estimated at 100 million baht (about $3 million).

Viroj, 33, lost hundreds of thousands of dollars when his store, which was named "About" and catered to fashionable Thai teenagers, went up in flames with the cinema.

"It's all gone. My entire stocks, all clothes on display. Nothing remains," Viroj said. He had brought some bags with him, hoping to fill them with clothes salvaged from the fire, but he left with the sacks empty. Nothing could be saved.

Hairdresser Yanathorn Nathanya retrieved a stool, towels, a water cooler, some perm chemicals and a half-dozen tubes of dye from her salon, named "Jack," on the Siam Cinema's second floor.

A half-burned sign was all that remained of a Dunkin' Donuts shop at the movie complex.

Inside the movie theater, the roof had collapsed and only metal frames of the 800 seats remained. It had closed May 13 because of the protests, so it never got to replace "Iron Man 2" with "Bounty Hunter."

When it opened in 1966 with "Battle of the Bulge," starring Henry Fonda and Robert Shaw, the Siam Cinema was one of the most modern theaters of its day, featuring an escalator that carried patrons up to a mezzanine-level box office.

Perhaps Wednesday's biggest property loss was the destruction of CentralWorld, one of Southeast Asia's largest shopping malls. One end of the long building had caved in where the fire was fiercest, and the site continued to smolder Thursday.

For many Bangkok residents, the 21-year-old CentralWorld was more than a shopping center. It had recently undergone a multimillion-dollar facelift and boasted more than 500 shops, including a Gap and the Japanese department store Isetan.

Larger than the Mall of America in Minnesota, CentralWorld also had a public library and what was touted as the biggest food court in Asia.