In the 1950s and 1960s, travelogues preferred to cite folk legends that reflected the living conditions of the working people in ancient China. These legends explained the names and characteristics of natural landscapes and cultural relics in the form of stories, involving natural disasters, class oppression, production activities, cultural creation, and other aspects, forming a unique landscape narrative. Fundamentally, these folk legends are the product of alternative imagination developed by the lower class people in the face of harsh living environments. They project their bitter memories onto the mountains and rivers, fixing their beautiful imagination on eternal natural landscapes, attempting to transcend current suffering. Therefore, when narrating these folk legends, the author mostly traces the origin of the legends and the process of changes and developments in the fate or events of the characters based on the appearance characteristics of the landscape. This is actually a re-exploration of the origin of the landscape, viewing and interpreting the landscape from the perspective of the working people. The visual practice subject of the landscape also changes from the literati class to the working class, thus driving away the class consciousness parasitic in traditional landscape discourse and reconstructing a landscape recognition device belonging to the masses with political mobilization function. Just so, these legends ostensibly tell a story about the ancestors who feared nature and imagined conquering nature, but their practical significance has spilled over the story itself. Through the relationship mechanism of man and nature, they show a meaningful picture of the Chinese people from transforming nature and conquering nature to transforming the old society and building a new society, thus expressing their sincere recognition of the socialist new China. From the perspective of reception aesthetics, the folklore in the text is not a complete story, but rather a call for a new story that takes place in the new era, corresponding to the discourse structure of remembering bitterness and longing for sweetness at that time. This structure operates through the embedding of spatiotemporal entities and the debunking of legends, solving many logical loopholes in folk legends that are contrary to reason. The creation and reception of folk legends basically reproduce the production process of local knowledge in China. Introducing these legends into travelogues is a writing style based on folk perspectives, which provides useful inspiration for opening up literary imagination space and constructing an independent discourse system for Chinese literature.