While legends are not credible history, they encapsulate the aspirations and strategies of people within specific historical contexts along with the implied authentic historical circumstances. The boundary demarcation legend of One Arrow’s Distance has been widely circulated across China’s northern-southern agro-pastoral transitional zones, particularly in border areas between Inner Mongolia, Hebei, Shanxi, Shaanxi, Gansu, Sichuan, and Yunnan provinces. Though often dismissed by historians as absurd anecdotes, this legend in fact embodies a distinctive historical memory reflecting the migration patterns of predominantly Han agricultural populations during the Qing dynasty and their spatial order reconstruction through ethnic integration in frontier regions. It also serves as a compelling case study demonstrating how farming and nomadic groups historically negotiated coexistence and mutually reshaped their collective memories. Although versions of the One Arrow’s Distance legend vary across northern and southern regions, their narrative structures and core motifs remain strikingly consistent. These tales predominantly revolve around two pivotal historical events: Yang Liulang’s resistance against the Liao forces during the Song-Liao confrontation era at the junction of Shanxi, Inner Mongolia, Shaanxi, and Gansu, and Zhuge Liang’s southern expedition to ethnic regions of Sichuan and Yunnan during the Three Kingdoms period. Through the incorporation of distinctive localized knowledge, the legend has evolved into a collectively celebrated narrative among Han, Mongolian, Tibetan, Yi, and other ethnic groups. The One Arrow’s Distance boundary legend metaphorically represents how borderland communities strategically rationalized contemporary agricultural-pastoral boundaries and ethnic distribution patterns through constructing historical memories of ceasefire negotiations and arrow-shot demarcation. The derivation and dissemination of this legend not only embody border populations’ grassroots aspirations for peaceful coexistence and their folk wisdom in reconfiguring Chinese cultural symbols, but also reflect multiple dimensions of human interactions and frontier spatial construction since the Qing dynasty from a grassroots perspective. The deep mechanism of social integration and identity formation through historical memory construction, as revealed by this legend, offers significant insights for reinterpreting historical events, spatial configurations, and group identity dynamics through the microcosmic lens of collective memory embedded in folk narratives and myths that carry popular consciousness.