Most of the surfaces in the niche housing the Buddha must have been decorated with colorful murals, surrounded the Buddha with many paintings, but only fragments were remaining in modern times. For the 38 meter Eastern Buddha, built between AD 544 to 595, the main remaining murals were the ones on the ceiling, right above the head of the Buddha. Recent datation based on stylistic and historical analysis confirms dates for these mural which follow the carbon-rated dates for the construction of the Buddhas themselves: the murals of the Eastern Buddha have been dated to the 6th to 8th century AD by Klimburg-Salter (1989), and post AD 635/645 by Tanabe (2004). As late as 2002, Marylin Martin Rhie argued a 3rd-4th century date for the Eastern Buddha, based on artistic criteria.