
Russian warship ‘carrying £100B in gold’ discovered off South Korea - fold_left
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/07/18/russian-warship-carrying-100-billion-gold-discovered-south-korea/
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wahern
From a December 2000 NY Times report,

    
    
      Shares of Dong Ah surged 41 percent this week, to 410 won
      (33 cents, United States) on Wednesday. Today, the Korean
      Stock Exchange halted trading and ordered the company to
      provide an explanation on Friday.
    
      The run-up in the stock came after local media reports said
      that the venture, the Korea Ocean Research and Development
      Institute, had discovered a warship of the Imperial Russian
      Navy, the 6,200-ton Dmitri Donskoi. ....
    
      ...
    
      Sergei Klimovsky, chief of scholarly research at the Central
      Naval Museum in St. Petersburg, told Bloomberg: "As far as
      we know, at best, there might have only been some gold coins
      on board to pay the salaries of officers. But there was no
      hoard of gold, and to send a large amount of gold by ship
      from St. Petersburg to Vladivostok is ridiculous. It would
      have been safer to send it by rail."
    

[https://www.nytimes.com/2000/12/08/business/investor-
frenzy-...](https://www.nytimes.com/2000/12/08/business/investor-frenzy-over-
tales-of-gold.html)

~~~
lainga
I eagerly await the next South Korean discovery of the ship in 2034.

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perl4ever
"£100 billion in gold" sounds like an implausibly large amount. I estimate it
is about 3 or 4 thousand metric tons. But could such a ship carry that much?

~~~
lainga
Amount of gold aside, it looks like the _Dmitrii Donskoi_ sank during or
around the battle of Tsushima, having sailed all the way from the Baltic, and
around the Cape of Good Hope, in one of the most ignominious and infamous
fleet movements in history. Why would Russia put several hundred metric tonnes
of gold on a cruiser which was heading to fight Japanese warships?

~~~
lostlogin
The whole thing was a farce. I’m not sure if it was a thing common with other
navies but reading the history of the ship is reading a long list of accidents
and mistakes. The shambles of the war with the Japanese is is well covered in
Montifiore’s book on the Romanovs, and he presents it as a collection of worn
out ships, a badly led navy and a massive vanity project with a healthy dose
of racism leading to underestimation of Japanese abilities.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_cruiser_Dmitrii_Dons...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_cruiser_Dmitrii_Donskoi)

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breadAndWater
The ship sank in 1905, in case people who can't bypass the paywall might have
been wondering.

~~~
cardiffspaceman
Nowadays, several countries have GDP much greater than "£100B" and I think
that was very much not the case in 1905. Anyone have the figures for 1905 at
their fingertips?

