Tiger reached Chinese waters in late August 1900, weeks after the peak of the Boxer Uprising. She stopped at Xiamen and Shantou, then diverted to Hong Kong for dry-docking in Kowloon to repair the damage from her grounding. She did not reach Qingdao -- the German colony at Jiaozhou Bay that would be her home port for the rest of her life -- until October 22. By then, the fighting was winding down. Tiger's assignment was patrol duty in the Yellow Sea, relieving her sister ship. It was steady, unglamorous work: steaming up the Yangtze, visiting Japanese ports, showing the flag in a region where European empires projected power from gunboat decks.

Peacetime cruises filled Tiger's years with the kind of diplomatic theater that defined colonial naval service. In January 1902, she carried the East Asia Squadron commander to Bangkok for a formal audience with King Chulalongkorn of Siam. She repeated the trip at year's end. When the Russo-Japanese War erupted in 1904, Tiger evacuated German nationals from Incheon as Japanese troops landed in Korea, then helped intern the crippled Russian battleship Tsesarevich and three destroyers that sought refuge at Qingdao. On August 23, 1904, she joined a fruitless search for a missing Admiralty Staff officer who had simply vanished. In December 1905, she returned to Incheon one final time to retrieve the German consul -- the consulate was being dissolved, Japan having absorbed Korea entirely.

Tiger was at Chongqing, deep in the upper Yangtze, when the Xinhai Revolution broke out on October 10, 1911. She raced downstream to Hankou, where she met her sister Luchs carrying the squadron commander. An international landing party was organized from the warships gathered in the city, though the foreign quarter was never attacked. Tiger moved on to Nanjing, then back to Qingdao, and spent the first four months of 1912 cruising southern Chinese waters as the Qing dynasty collapsed. The revolution succeeded quickly enough that Tiger never had to intervene in any city -- she was a witness to the end of imperial China rather than a participant in it.

In January 1914, Tiger embarked on a grand tour with the new East Asia Squadron commander, Vice Admiral Maximilian von Spee, visiting Bangkok, the Dutch East Indies, and the Philippines. She returned to Qingdao for maintenance, and in late June sailed to Tianjin on the Hai River. She arrived back at Qingdao on July 4 and was preparing to return to the Yangtze when news arrived of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Von Spee cancelled all orders. Within weeks, World War I had begun, Japan entered on the side of the Allies, and Tiger's fate was sealed. Decommissioned on August 1, she was stripped of her guns and crew to arm an auxiliary cruiser. On October 29, during the final stage of the Siege of Qingdao, shipyard personnel detonated scuttling charges aboard the empty hull and sank her in the harbor. Three of her sisters met the same end.