The old man sighed and pushed his thick-bottomed glasses up.
"As for this, I can only say, judging from the pictures, the method used to gild the stone carvings suggests that it was made later than the Thirty-three Skies Grottoes. After all, such a thing was not accomplished overnight.
The earliest construction of the Thirty-three Skies that we can verify dates back to the Northern Liang of the Sixteen Kingdoms. It rises forty-three meters above ground level with seven tiers and twenty-one grottoes, terraced like a mountain range. Of course, most of what remains today has been restored in later times, given that many of the Buddha statues and wall paintings are completely destroyed.
