The plot of the story of "The Million Pound Bank Note" centers on the impossibility of encashing (兑现) a high valued bank note by a common man. Within this story it is narrated that only two such notes were ever issued and anyone who walks into a bank to cash that note will get himself in trouble. So, do such million pound bank notes really exist? Let's do a bit of digging around for the purpose of satisfying the curiosity over this question.
Such high valued pound bank notes do exist, and they were usually used for transactions (交易) within banks. The Bank of England used "one million" and "hundred million" pound bank notes to maintain parity (平价) with bank notes issued by Scottish and Northern Irish banks. These notes — the one million ones were called "giants" and came in A5 size and the hundred million ones were called "titans" having an A4 size — were more like IOU documents (legal forms that describe a loan between a lender and a borrower) and they were special issues from the Bank of England to meet the requirement of backing the value of everyday notes issued by banks in Scotland and Northern Ireland.
Nine such one million pound notes were issued in connection with the Marshall Plan (the US's post-war aid program to Western Europe), equal to the loan from the US after World War II (WWII) in 1948. After cancellation, of these nine only seven were destroyed and two survived with private collectors. Such high valued notes are not usually found in the normal transactional scenes and it is believed that notes worth eight billion pounds were printed in these heavy denominations (面额) in total.
Mark Twain can create humor from narrations of unrealistic (不现实的) and often funny simple situations and "The Million Pound Bank Note" is a nice example of his storytelling abilities.
