In recent years, subsurface drainage has been greatly advocated in the Yellow River Delta area for salinity control and land reclamation. With the very uniform textured silty sand as major soils in the Yellow River Delta, and lacking of gravel envelope material, there is an urgent need to select proper synthetic envelope for subsurface drainage construction in the area. Proper selection of envelope materials is critical for a subsurface drainage system construction. Geotextile envelope has multiple advantages, including good water conductivity, retaining soil particles from clogging the drains, low cost and convenience for mechanical construction. Thus geotextile envelope is widely used in subsurface drainage system constructions throughout the world. In China, however, very few subsurface drainage projects used geotextiles as envelope materials for various reasons. Therefore, geotextile envelope may find its wide application in many poorly drained areas, such as the Yellow River Delta in China provided that proper selection criteria are met. Based on soil particle size analysis and theoretical calculations, this paper presents an experimental study on geotextile material used for subsurface drainage envelope in the Yellow River Delta, China. A testing permeameter was built on the basis of existing literature-Materials for subsurface drainage system (IDP 60). The selection criteria have three major factors, including thickness, permeability and O90. After analyzing the soil particle size distribution and measuring the saturated hydraulic conductivity (Ks) with the falling head method, we chose two types of geotextiles as the tested samples. One of these geo-textiles (Geotextile A) has a larger O90 than that in the criterion by IDP 60, while the other one (Geotextile B) meets the criterion. With these essential information, we conducted a series of experimental studies to evaluate the performance of geotextiles in filtration, permeability and anti-clogging. After each run of experiment, we measured the mass and particle size distribution of the soils passed the geotextile, and the weight of the geotextiles before and after use. In addition, continued experiments were conducted to monitor the changes of saturated hydraulic conductivity of the geotextiles using the permeameter. The results showed that, among the final two candidate geo-textile materials, one type (Typar 3201G) satisfied the anti-clogging and the permeability requirement but exhibited the risk of siltation; the other one (Typar SF20) satisfied the requirements of filtration, permeability and anti-clogging. These results indicated that the appropriate geotextile envelope for the study area should be thin enough and the O90 of the material should meet the selection criterion. We also found that the all Ks of the geotextile systems decreased with time and became relatively stable after a certain time period. The deceases of Ks may be caused by clogging of the geotextiles or that of the soil columns itself. With an additional experiment to examine key factors for reducing hydraulic conductivity of the experimental system, we found that the clogging of soil columns was the primary factor and the geotextiles performed well in conducting drainage water. Findings from this research may provide technical support for subsurface drainage construction in the Yellow River Delta.