“Insensitive” TikTok tourists have been slammed for a “real-life Temple Run” trend that sees them running around the sacred Angkor Wat to mimic a video game and get views

A new TikTok trend showing tourists running around Angkor Wat in an attempt to recreate a popular video game has sparked concern among conservationists.

Tourists have filmed themselves running through the UNESCO World Heritage temple in Cambodia, claiming it is “the real-life temple run”.

Temple Run, created by Imagini Studios, follows an explorer with an ancient relic as he flees from creatures that pursue him. The game proved hugely popular when it was released: Temple Run 2 racked up 50 million downloads in its first two weeks in January 2013.

Tourists have filmed themselves running through the Hindu-Buddhist temple (built by Khmer king Suryavarman II in the early 12th century) and have racked up millions of views while doing so.

This set off alarm bells among conservationist Simon Warrack, who said: South Porcelain Morning Mail that viewers might perceive the trend as culturally insensitive and could damage the temple.

The conservationist, who has worked to preserve the site for 30 years, added that the trend could also be perceived as insensitive to Eastern religions, saying: “You wouldn’t run around St Peter’s in Rome or any Western church, so why is it OK to do so in Cambodia?”

He added that the trend not only represents physical damage to the historical site but can also harm the spiritual and cultural value of the temple.

Meanwhile, Hans Leisen, who led a German conservation project at Angkor Wat, called the trend “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 fragile carvings.”

Despite the backlash, TikTok users have garnered millions of views on clips that have seen them taking part in the trend.

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

Meanwhile, influencer Jena, who participated in the trend in 2019, has continued to receive supportive comments on her video Five years later, in 2024, someone said, “2024, here to see the temple run.”

Content creator Sarah from the UK, known as @sarah0utside On TikTok, she also shared a clip of herself running through the temple with the caption: ‘Real life temple run.’

On the other hand, travel content creator Jake from Greece racked up 800 thousand views in a video of himself jumping from rock to rock inside the temple.

A 2021 study found that the ancient Cambodian capital of Angkor Wat had a staggering 900,000 inhabitants 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 revealed that the capital of the defunct Khmer Empire was home to between 700,000 and 900,000 people at its peak in the 13th century.

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

The findings draw on more than 30 years of data to create the first model of population growth in the Khmer capital.

Sarah Klassen and her colleagues suggested that this technique for modeling inner-city growth could be applied to other premodern cities.

The researchers said this could offer answers to some of archaeology’s biggest challenges, including the rise and fall of social complexity.

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

In the mid-19th century, the French naturalist Henri Mouhot, who provided one of the first detailed accounts of Angkor for European audiences, cites an oral tradition that the Khmer Empire “maintained an army of five or six million soldiers.”

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

He cautiously suggested a total population of 1.9 million in a region around Angkor in the second half of the 12th century.

More recent attempts based on the carrying capacity of the landscape have estimated a population of approximately 750,000 people.

Until now, no comprehensive demographic study of Angkor has been conducted, as the city’s non-religious architectural structures were made of organic materials that have long since decomposed.

This made conventional methods of estimating population size and density impossible, according to Klassen and his colleagues.

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

Researchers found that it may have taken several centuries for Angkor’s population to peak, with growth occurring at different rates across its three occupation zones.

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

Comparing Angkor’s growth to that of other preindustrial tropical and subtropical urban centers, researchers determined that its range of metropolitan urban area densities was much lower than that of the Mayan city of Caracol.

However, the density of its civic-ceremonial centers was comparable to that of Teotihuacan in what is now Mexico or Anyang in China.

The findings have been published in the journal Scientific advances.