In 1997, the Bank of China checked the accounts and found that Premier Zhou had a huge deposit of 12,000 pounds under his name. After the founding of New China in 1949, Zhou Enlai's monthly salary was 404.80 yuan, and his wife Deng Yingchao's monthly salary was 342.70 yuan.
However, in 1997, the head office of the Bank of China, while conducting an internal audit of the accounts of the party, government and army, found a huge deposit of up to 12,000 pounds, which was deposited in the name of Premier Zhou on July 8, 1976. According to statistics, from 1958 to 1976, the total salary income of Premier Zhou and Deng Yingchao was 161442 yuan.
Premier Zhou has always been honest and honest, selfless, and he has always put the interests of the people first and regarded money as a foreign object. According to the exchange rate at that time, 12,000 pounds was equivalent to 82,308 yuan, which was undoubtedly a huge amount of money at the time.
So, how did this money come about? And why did he deposit in the name of Premier Zhou in the Bank of China?
After the Bank of China found out this huge amount, it immediately reported it, involving Premier Zhou, and everyone attached great importance to it, and immediately sent someone to investigate the origin of the deposit. Although it has been many years, the work is not very difficult, because the source of income of Premier Zhou and his wife is very single, it is easy to check, and their income is only the balance of wages and interest deposited in the bank.
The latter is completely negligible. Compared with the single income of Premier Zhou and his wife, their expenditure is very complicated, in addition to the daily meal fee, rent fee, newspaper subscription fee, party fee, a large part of the expenditure is used to subsidize relatives and public welfare donations, and the pocket cost of the premier couple has been very small.
Premier Zhou and his wife, who had no children of their own, poured their parental love into their nephews and nieces, and the premier's nephew recalled: "Half of their salary was used to raise us." This is indeed an exaggeration, but it is basically in line with the facts.
According to statistics, of the 160,000 yuan in wages obtained by the prime minister and his wife, nearly 37,000 yuan was used to subsidize relatives, more than 10,000 yuan of wages were used to subsidize the staff and friends and relatives around them, and a considerable part of the remaining money was donated to people in need.
Obviously, this huge amount is not Premier Zhou's personal deposit, but why did it be deposited in the name of Premier Zhou? The Bank of China examined it closely and found that the deposit actually involved a story from more than half a century ago, that is, 1940, in the middle of World War II.
At the beginning of World War II, the Germans sent planes to bomb London for ten months, and a 22-year-old British girl named Dolly lost her job because her company was blown up by the Germans.
In order to continue his life, Dolly came to the London branch of bank of China to apply for a job, and wanted to apply for a teller. Dolly used to work in a trading company, had relevant office experience, and was a clever person, so he was hired smoothly and became a foreign employee of the London branch of the Bank of China. At that time, Dolly's task was not only to make payments at the counter and receive customers who handled business on a daily basis, but also to pay monthly salaries and deposits to overseas Kuomintang seafarers.
After a period of contact with these seafarers, Dolly found that these seafarers had the same bad problems as British men, and once they received their wages, they liked to eat, drink, gamble and squander.
Dolly knew that China was in a critical moment at this time, suffering from Japanese fascism, and she was very unaccustomed to these seafarers ignoring the safety of their own country and squandering it. Therefore, Dolly persuaded them to donate money to support their homeland and drive the invaders away as soon as possible. Under her influence, some seafarers woke up and donated money to the country to support the War of Resistance.
During this time, Dolly met a Chinese with a sense of justice, Liu Benkun, who graduated from Tsinghua University.
The two gradually came together, and after marriage, Dolly gave himself a Chinese name, called Liu Daorui.
On October 1, 1949, the People's Republic of China was founded. Since it had just escaped from the war, the country was in ruins and was in urgent need of funds to stimulate the country, and the London branch of the Bank of China had a large amount of foreign exchange in its hands, which could play a great help to the construction of new China. In order to protect these state-owned assets from being transferred by the Kuomintang, Premier Zhou set up a general management office at the Bank of China to notify employees of overseas banks to freeze their assets and wait for them to be seized. However, at this time, the leader of the London branch was inclined to the Kuomintang, and he was unwilling to accept the management of the General Administration Office, and he also planned to transfer foreign exchange to Taiwan. In the end, with the efforts of Liu Benkun and others, a large amount of foreign exchange was saved.
Afterwards, Liu Benkun was appointed as Xiangli by the head office, and the living conditions were getting better and better, and he and Liu Daorui (Dolly) lived in London for nearly ten years, with a house and a car. But he has always had a wish, that is, to return to the embrace of the motherland.
Liu Benkun and his wife Liu Daorui said their thoughts, but they did not expect that their wives did not object and were willing to return to China with him and join the Chinese nationality. Liu Was so pleased that he sold his london fortune at a low price and returned to China in early 1967.
After returning home, the two continued to work at bona fide, and although their lives were not as stable as in Britain, they did not want to return to Britain. In order to continue to build a new China, they remitted the £12,000 of the property sold to Premier Zhou through the bank, and also wrote a letter, sandwiched between the £12,000 bills of exchange, and sent them to Premier Zhou together.
After receiving the letter and the bill of exchange, Premier Zhou instructed: Personal deposits, which the state cannot receive, find the donor as soon as possible and return the money.
Since the search for donors had not been carried out at this time, the investigation staff deposited the money in the name of Premier Zhou into the Bank of China for the safety of the huge amount of money, which was not discovered until 1997.
In 1997, after discovering the huge sum, the BoC found the staff in charge of the investigation, and after understanding the situation, they decided to continue to carry out Premier Zhou's instructions to find donors and return the money. After repeated searches, they finally found Liu Benkun and his wife, and wanted to return the money to them with 467,000 yuan of interest. Although the life of Liu Benkun and his wife was not very good at this time, they resolutely refused to accept this money. After much coordination, they decided to donate the money to the Bank of China and set up the Liu Benkun Fund to reward outstanding employees in the bank.
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