A man surnamed Zhang in Muyang county of east China’s city of Suqian, Jiangsu province took a bag of damaged, rotten bills worth 100,000 yuan (15,700 U.S. dollars) to a local bank for possible replacement. According to Zhang, for reasons unknown, his mother buried the money under their kitchen floor after wrapping it in a plastic bag and sealing it in an iron box over four years ago.
This summer when her son Zhang was preparing to get married, she recalled the stashed cash and requested her family dig the money out, only to find a heap of severely mutilated notes. According to him, “My parents were frozen at the site. It was their life savings over years of hard work in the cities. They just can’t accept the loss.”
Managers at the bank were surprised to find the notes reduced to a load of rotten, clamped-together lumps. A mutilated currency expert in the central bank’s local branch examined the notes and said that he bills can hardly get redeemed. However, he claimed he would try to seek better solutions, saying “After all, it’s a lot of money, and we hope to help the Zhangs minimize their loss.”
