In this letter, a novel M-ary code-selected direct sequence (DS) ultra-wideband (UWB) communication system is presented. Our purpose is to achieve a high data rate by an M-ary code-selected direct sequence bipolar pulse amplitude modulation (MCSDS-BPAM) scheme. In this system, a particular DS code sequence is selected by the $log_2M$/2 bits from the DS gold code set. This scheme can accomplish both a high data rate without increasing the system bandwidth or changing the pulse shape and improve the BER with an increase of modulation level M even at a lower signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). The receiver signal processing algorithm is given for an MCSDS-BPAM UWB system over an ideal AWGN channel and correlation receivers.