In southern Jiangsu, it’s imperative to reinforce management of the textile wastewater treatment and discharge due to a large amount of textile wastewater generated by thousands of dyeing and printing enterprises. Compared with traditional indexes of organic pollution such as chemical oxygen demand and biochemical oxygen demand, fluorescence excitation-emission matrix, which has an advantage of fast measure and high sensitivity, could exhibit organic composition in water/wastewater. In this study, the effluents reaching the discharge standards from five different dyeing and printing wastewater treatment plants in southern Jiangsu were collected. TOC, UV254 and fluorescence excitation-emission matrix were used to characterize dissolved organic matters in the treated textile effluents. The results showed that the effluents with UVA254 by TOC ranging from 1.42 to 4.29 L·mg-1·m-1 had a similar aromaticity with the effluents from the sewage treatment plants. Despite of some visional differences between excitation emission matrixes of all effluent samples, there were two major peaks locating at the excitation/emission wavelength of around 230/340 and 275/320 nm. The fluorescence intensity of the treated textile effluents after Raman calibration was much higher than that of treated municipal wastewater while that of humification index was much smaller, which indicated that non-humic aromatic compounds accounted for a much larger proportion in treated textile effluent than treated municipal wastewater. Some commonly used dyes were collected from dyeing and printing enterprises and their fluorescence excitation-emission matrix was measured. Thus, the strong fluorescence signals of treated textile effluents could be derived from the residual dyes and their incomplete degradation products. This indicated that the effluents of the dyeing and printing wastewater treatment plants might have some negative environmental impact although it reached the discharge standards. Fluorescence excitation-emission matrix could be a promising tool to exhibit the organic components in water.