This paper investigates the fouling and cleaning of a tubular ultrafiltration membrane for the treatment of municipal wastewater. A bistage fouling hypothesis, i.e., channel clogging and gel layer forming, was introduced to elucidate the evolutional mechanism of ultrafiltration fouling. An effective method for channel-clogging prevention was developed, resulting in an extension of operation period to more than eight weeks. The multistep chemical cleaning protocol was tested to remove the gel layer from fouled membrane surface and further optimized in terms of cleaning temperature and NaClO concentration. It was found that the optimized chemical cleaning could restore the membrane's standard permeability to higher than 94% if taking the standard permeability of a new membrane as 100%.