In the early years of the twentieth century, Kaiser Wilhelm II headquartered his East Asia Squadron in the port city of Tsingtao in northern China, Germany's principal naval base in the Pacific. On the southern coast of Shandong province, the town was more European than Asian. German engineers had laid out boulevards lined with linden trees. Germans had built the port's most prominent landmark, a Lutheran church, on a hill overlooking the harbor.

In the years before World War I, the German flag flew over the Marianas, the Marshall Islands, and Samoa in the central Pacific. To the south, Germany held additional colonies, including the Bismarck Archipelago and the Solomon Islands. The East Asia Squadron was meant to safeguard German interests in this far-flung region—a mission that had once consisted of watching for any encroachment by the expansion-minded French. But the threat of hostilities in Europe put the squadron in a precarious position six thousand miles from home.

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One of the most respected officers of the kaiser's navy commanded the East Asia Squadron. Vice Admiral Maximilian Graf von Spee, 53, was descended from a prominent Prussian family. He was a thorough navy professional, with a special interest in gunnery.

Spee's fleet was widely scattered at the outbreak of war on August 1, 1914. The armored cruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau had left Tsingtao for a long cruise to Germany's Pacific holdings and were not scheduled to return until September. Of the light cruisers, Leipzig was engaged in gunboat diplomacy off the Pacific coast of Mexico, and Nürnberg was en route to relieve that vessel. The only modern vessel left at Tsingtao was Spee's third light cruiser, Emden.

Emden had been commissioned in 1909, and its entire operational life had been with the East Asia Squadron. The ship was 387 feet long, forty-four feet at the beam, and displaced thirty-six hundred tons. Its main armament consisted of ten 4.1-inch guns, two forward, two aft, and three mounted on each side. Its triple-expansion engines could power the cruiser at up to twenty-four knots. Three tall funnels were only partially successful in keeping the ship's smoke from harassing its gun layers.

Though it was relatively new, Emden did not represent the latest in naval technology. Like most warships of its time, Emden burned coal rather than oil, and its underwater prow was a throwback to the days when ramming was an essential tactic in naval warfare. It had no condenser for producing fresh water. The Royal Navy's newest cruisers were larger and faster and generally mounted 6-inch guns compared with Emden's 4.1-inch guns. Still, navy professionals admired the German cruiser, whose sleek lines led some to call it the "Swan of the East."

Emden's skipper had come to navy command by a curious route. Born in 1873, Karl Friedrich Max von Müller seemed destined for an army career. His father had been a colonel in the Prussian army that crushed France in 1870. He himself had attended a military academy in Schleswig-Holstein and subsequently entered the Prussian army. In 1891, however, Müller, at 18, transferred to the navy.

By 1894 he was signals officer on a battleship, and from there—promoted to lieutenant—he began a two-year posting on a gunboat based in German East Africa (now part of Tanzania). During this assignment he contracted malaria, an illness that would plague him for the rest of his life.

From 1909 to 1912 Müller served in the Imperial Navy Office in Berlin, where he impressed Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz. Not until the spring of 1913, however, did the 39-year-old Müller receive his first sea command, Emden.

After two months on the Yangtze River, Emden returned to Tsingtao, where Müller received word that he had been promoted to commander. Spee had come to admire young Müller, whose quiet demeanor disguised a fiercely nationalistic outlook.

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