Gu Yanwu
The Qing Dynasty scholar Gu Yanwu (1613–1682) suggested that the construction of the Cloud Platform was begun in 1326, on the basis that the "History of Yuan" records that a Uyghur official called Uduman () was sent to carve dharanis in the language of the western barbarians (i.e. Tibetan) on the rockface at Juyongguan. However, the inscriptions referred to here are probably not the inscriptions on the Cloud Platform, and so modern scholarship dates the construction of the Cloud Platform to 1342 or 1343.