Pückler-Muskau was the first of five children of Count Carl Ludwig Hans Erdmann von Pückler-Muskau-Groditz (1754-1811), and his wife, Countess Clementine of Callenberg (1770-1850), who gave birth to him at age 15.

He served for some time in the Saxon "Garde du Corps" cavalry regiment at Dresden, and afterwards traveled through France and Italy, often by foot.

Joining the war of liberation against Napoleon I of France, he left Muskau under the General Inspectorate of his friend, the writer and composer Leopold Schefer.

He attended plays at His Majesty's Theatre, Haymarket and Drury Lane (admiring performances of Eliza O'Neill), studied parkland landscaping, and in Wales visited the Ladies of Llangollen in 1828.

After Pückler's return, the letters were published in two volumes.The book was an enormous success in Germany,[5] and also caused a great stir when it appeared in English as Tour of a German Prince (1831–32).

In the same year, at the slave market in Cairo, he purchased an Ethiopian Oromo girl in her early teens, whom he named Mahbuba ("the beloved").

He took her to Asia Minor, Greece, and Vienna, where he introduced her to European high society, but Mahbuba developed tuberculosis and died in Muskau in 1840.

The prince's literary estate was inherited by writer Ludmilla Assing, who wrote his biography and posthumously published correspondence and diaries unpublished during his lifetime.

This is most evident in his first work Briefe eines Verstorbenen (4 vols, 1830–1831), in which he expresses many independent judgments about England and other countries he visited in the late 1820s and about prominent people he met.

In Roberto Bolaño's novel 2666 the dessert named after Fürst Pückler is mentioned as an example of one's reputation being defined unexpectedly by accomplishments of lesser significance.