When the Dutch navy sailed up the Thames estuary in 1667 and launched a surprise attack on British ships, the naval administrator and diarist Samuel Pepys panicked that “the whole kingdom is undone”. He sent his wife and father out of London with the gold pieces in which he kept his wealth to bury them in a garden.

Today’s Chinese and Indian buyers of jewellery and bars are not the first people to trust in gold for financial protection. It does not pay any dividends and it is very heavy, but in periods of war, crisis, inflation and turmoil, it is comforting to have around. “When bad things happen, gold comes into its own,” says John Reade, market strategist for the World Gold Council.

So it is a troubling reflection of the times that gold is making a comeback from being written off as an anachronism by many investors. The price of gold reached a record high of $2,531 per troy ounce on Tuesday, five times the inflation-adjusted price the UK got when it sold some gold reserves a quarter of a century ago (Switzerland was also a big seller of gold then).