Journals are important for determining the quality, academic values, and future implication for literature analysis. High quality journals represent the authority of academic research. To fully grasp the development patten and research quality of tourism geography in China, Acta Geographica Sinica is selected for analysis. Tourism research papers in Acta Geographica since 1990 were collected. CiteSpace was utilized for mapping the tourism geography research in the past 30 years. This paper shows major academic groups, research institutions, hot topics, and time evolution of tourism geography research published since 1990, and demonstrates the development of tourism field in the past 30 years. Results show that: the number of papers on tourism geography is increasing. Themes become diversified but mainly focus on "tourism development", "tourism flow", "tourism impact" and "spatial pattern". Research in tourism geography has undergone three stages: traditional tourism research, heritage tourism research, and diversified development. Research hotspots, methods, and development of tourism geography are affected by the upper level discipline. The hotspots of tourism geography research include not only traditional tourism geography topics, but also current geographical research trends, such as humanism, Marxism etc. Moreover, after the 20th century, tourism geography research started to incorporate humanism and positivism, which is in line with the trend of other branches of human geography. The research is aggregating to the East of China. The future tourism geography research needs to focus more on the central and western China. Since empirical research is far more than theoretical research, and traditional research topics still account for a large proportion, future tourism geography research should enhance academic cooperation and communication, integrate multi-disciplinary knowledge, and emphasize theoretical innovation to promote tourism geography development.