ABSTRACT
While Blakiston and Fleming's works describe the rigours of travel in unpopulated China, the events of mid-century changed the terms of the British engagement in the major cities of China as well. In particular, the previously inaccessible capital of Beijing began to be imagined as a possible tourist destination reachable from the treaty port of Tianjin. Dennys, like other authors of this era, began his stay in China in government service before undertaking a variety of private enterprises upon the close of the Second Opium War. Though Notes for Tourists breaks little new ground in the specific destinations it proposes - travel narratives like Robert Fortune's Yedo and Peking (1863) had already been cataloguing the same chronology of visits to the Temple of Heaven, the Forbidden City and the Ming Tombs for several years - the text is significant for shifting the subject following this chronology.
