This paper will explore the relationship between constructions of national historical narratives and the nascent tourist industry in Lebanon from the late 1920s through the 1940s, with an emphasis on the decade of the 1930s. It will investigate the ways in which the political territory of “Lebanon” during the French mandate was defined, exhibited, marketed, and manifested. It aims to show how hoteliers, guidebook writers, journalists, as well as ‘average’ citizens identified different “tourist publics” as Lebanese, Arab, or ‘western’, and will explore the assumptions that underwrote how those groups were defined as consumers and to what purpose. It analyzes representations of the land, on the one hand, and the village, on the other, to illustrate how the rural was deployed to indicate authenticity and tradition while simultaneously buttress a tourist industry that had a distinctly urban – and urbane – character in the form of beauty pageants. In the process, this paper will reveal similarities and differences in the ways that the Lebanese and the French understood the role that tourism could play in building a national economy with limited available natural resources; in delineating political boundaries within Lebanon as well as at its edges; and in cementing an image of national patrimony marked by particular materiality.