Chinese saying: 拾金不昧 “pick-up gold not conceal” (Singapore)

I’ve been playing a Chinese crossword puzzle game on my phone, featuring proverbs (generally four characters) and lines from Chinese poetry (generally five to seven characters per line).

One of them is 拾金不昧 shí jīn bù mèi / “pick-up gold not conceal”.  

This saying is to teach people not to pocket something that someone else has dropped.  It is what I was taught as a child.

One day, after the school day was over, my classmate Helen Wong and I (aged 11) were walking down the quiet side street that led to the bus stop when we saw a wallet sitting on the pavement.  We picked it up, looked inside for clues to the owner’s details — none, but there were 20 dollars inside.  That was a lot of money in the 1960s.  Helen and I looked around, no sign of anyone.  We thought we’d stand there and wait, in case he came back.  (As it was a wallet, it’d be a male owner, as no women in those days in Singapore used a wallet.)  After a while, nobody turned up.  Our 拾金不昧 upbringing had taught us not to pocket what was not ours, so after some discussion, we decided to put it back where we'd found it, so that the owner would find it if he came back to look for it.

After we were about 20 yards away, we turned back and saw another girl from our school picking it up and pocketing it.

(Singapore, 1965)