During the 18th century, Western scholars reached a reasonable basic level of understanding of the geography and most of the history of the region, though knowledge of the areas least accessible to Western travelers, like Japan and Tibet, and their languages, remained limited. Enlightenment thinkers characterized aspects of the pagan East as superior to the Christian West, in Montesquieu's "Lettres Persanes" or Voltaire's ironic promotion of Zoroastrianism; others, like Edward Gibbon, praised the relative religious tolerance of the Middle East as opposed to the intolerant Christian West, and many, including Diderot and Voltaire, the high social status of scholarship in Mandarin China.