‘Insensitive’ TikTok tourists slammed over ‘real-life Temple Run’ trend which sees them sprinting through sacred Angkor Wat to mimic video game for views

A new TikTok trend that sees tourists running around Angkor Wat in an attempt to recreate a popular video game has raised concerns among conservationists.

Holidaymakers have filmed themselves sprinting through a temple in Cambodia, a UNESCO World Heritage site, in what they call the ‘Real Temple Running’.

Temple Run, developed by Imagini Studios, follows an explorer with an ancient relic as they run from creatures that pursue them. The game proved popular upon its release, with Temple Run 2 receiving 50 million downloads in its first two weeks in January 2013.

Tourists have filmed themselves sprinting through the Hindu-Buddhist temple, built by Khmer king Suryavarman II in the early 12th century, in a video that has been viewed millions of times.

It has raised alarm bells for conservationist Simon Warrack, who said South China Morning post that bystanders may view this trend as culturally insensitive and could damage the temple.

The conservationist, who has been working to preserve the site for 30 years, added that the trend could also be seen as insensitive to Eastern religions. He said: ‘You wouldn’t run through St Peter’s in Rome or any other Western church, so why would you be able to do that in Cambodia?’

He added that the trend not only causes physical damage to the historic site but could also undermine the spiritual and cultural value of the temple.

Hans Leisen, who led a German conservation project at Angkor Wat, claimed the trend is “nonsense.”

He said, ‘If you run through the temple, you will not see the beauty of the carvings. And if you fall or stumble, you will touch a wall to steady yourself and endanger the delicate carvings.’

Despite the negative reactions, TikTok users have received millions of views on clips of themselves participating in the trend.

Content creator Chiara Contino’s clip of her sprinting through the temple has been viewed more than 2 million times.

Meanwhile, influencer Jena, who joined the trend in 2019, continues to receive messages of support video five years later, in 2024, someone said, ‘2024, here to see the temple turning’.

Content creator Sarah from the UK, who calls herself @sarah0utside on TikTok, also shared a clip of herself sprinting through the temple with the caption: ‘Real life Temple Run’.

Elsewhere, travel content creator Jake from Greece collected 800,000 views on a video of himself as he jumps from rock to rock in the temple.

A 2021 study found that the ancient Cambodian capital of Angkor Wat had a population of as many as 900,000 before it was abandoned in 1431.

An international team, led by the University of British Columbia, examined three decades of data to create a demographic model of the medieval city.

Their model showed that the capital of the long-dead Khmer Empire was home to between 700,000 and 900,000 people at its peak in the 13th century.

According to the researchers, this made it one of the largest pre-modern cities in the world, having developed over several centuries of growth at varying rates.

The findings are based on data spanning more than 30 years, creating the first model of demographic growth in this capital of the Khmer Empire.

Sarah Klassen and colleagues suggested that this technique for modeling the growth of urban centers could be applied to other premodern cities.

According to the researchers, this could provide answers to some of the greatest challenges in archaeology, including the rise and fall of societal complexity.

The question of Angkor’s demographic growth has been a source of ongoing speculation and controversy since the beginning of modern scholarship in the region.

In the mid-19th century, the French naturalist Henri Mouhot, who was the first to write a detailed account of Angkor for a European audience, quoted an oral tradition that stated that the Khmer Empire “maintained an army of five or six million soldiers.”

The first reasonably systematic attempt to calculate the population size of Angkor was made by archaeologist Bernard-Philippe Groslier.

He conservatively estimated that in the second half of the 12th century the region around Angkor was home to a total of 1.9 million people.

More recent attempts, based on the carrying capacity of the landscape, have estimated the population at around 750,000.

Until now, a comprehensive demographic study of Angkor had never been completed because the city’s non-religious architectural structures were made of organic materials that had long since decayed.

According to Klassen and colleagues, this made it impossible to estimate population size and density by conventional means.

To address this challenge, they combined decades of archaeological excavation data, historical archives and maps, recent lidar assessments, and various machine learning algorithms to create maps that model the city’s growth over time.

The researchers found that it may have taken several centuries for Angkor’s population to peak, with growth occurring at different rates in the three occupation zones.

These included the civic-ceremonial centre, where the royal residence and large stone temples were located, the metropolitan area and the dikes.

By comparing the growth of Angkor to other pre-industrial tropical and subtropical urban centers, the researchers found that the density of metropolitan areas was much lower than that of the Maya city of Caracol.

Yet the density of the civic and ceremonial center was comparable to that of Teotihuacan in present-day Mexico or Anyang in China.

The findings are published in the journal Scientific progress.