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?

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...

To pay the troops at Port Arthur, and because it anticipated winning any battles along the way.

Yes, something must be off of a factor of almost 20.

According to the just updated Wikipedia page:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_cruiser_Dmitrii_Donsko...

"200 tons of gold worth £100 billion (c. US$133 billion)"

Which puts it at 500 British Pounds per gram, while it should be around 30.

At about $40k/kg for gold, I get 2,500 metric tons. The ship was about 6,000 tons (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_cruiser_Dmitrii_Donsko...) so it theoretically could carry that, but it would be over half of its maximum load. Add in fuel, engines, guns, about 600 men, their food, etc. and assuming (unlikely) it would still float, you would have to be suicidal to take it to sea.

Wikipedia currently says 200 tons (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_cruiser_Dmitrii_Donsko...), but then it would be worth on the order of 10 billion.

That still seems a lot to me. What would a warship “assigned to the cruiser force of the Second Pacific Squadron” at wartime would need that much gold for?

Also, the current gold reserves of the USA are about 8,000 tons, worth in the ballpark of $200 billion. Even after striking out a zero, this find would be about 3% of that.