A new TikTok trend that sees tourists running around Angkor Wat in a bid to recreate a popular video game has sparked concern among conservationists.
Holidaymakers have recorded themselves sprinting through the temple in Cambodia, which is a UNESCO World Heritage site, claiming it’s ‘Temple Run in real life’.
Temple Run, established by Imagini Studios, follows an explorer with an ancient relic as they run from creatures chasing them. The game proved popular when released, with Temple Run 2 gaining 50 million downloads in its first two weeks in January 2013.
Tourists have recorded themselves sprinting through the Hindu-Buddhist temple – built by the Khmer King Suryavarman II in the early 12th century – and have racked up millions of views doing so.
It’s raised alarm bells with conservationist Simon Warrack, who told South China Morning Post that onlookers may perceive the trend as culturally insensitive and could damage the temple.
TikTok users, including Chiara Contino (pictured), have recorded themselves running through Cambodia’s Angkor Wat to take part in a viral trend dubbed ‘Temple Run in real life’
The conservationist, who has worked to preserve the site for 30 years, added that the trend may also be perceived as insensitive to Eastern religions, saying: ‘You wouldn’t run through St Peters in Rome or any Western church, so why is it OK to do it in Cambodia?’
He added that the trend not only poses physical damage to the historical site but may also damage the spiritual and cultural value of the temple.
Meanwhile, Hans Leisen, who led a German conservation project at Angkor Wat, claimed the trend is ‘nonsense’.
He said: ‘If you’re running through the temple, you will not see the beauty of the carvings. And if you fall or stumble, you’ll touch a wall to stabilise yourself and endanger the fragile carvings.’
Despite backlash, TikTok users have gained millions of views on clips which have seen them partaking in the trend.
Content creator Chiara Contino’s clip in which she sprinted through the temple was viewed more than 2 million times.
Meanwhile, influencer Jena, who took part in the trend in 2019, has continued to get comments of support on her video five years later in 2024, with one saying: ‘2024, here to see the temple run’.
Content creator Sarah from the UK, who goes by @sarah0utside on TikTok, also shared a clip of herself sprinting through the temple with the caption: ‘Real life Temple Run’.
TikTok content creator and influencer Jena (pictured) still gains new views on her ‘real life temple run’ clip, which she posted in 2019
Temple Run sees players run, jump, slide, and swing along wild paths while escaping a monster after stealing a relic from an ancient temple
Elsewhere, travel content creator Jake from Greece racked up 800 thousand views on 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 long-gone Khmer Empire housed between 700,000 and 900,000 people during its zenith in the 13th century.
According to the researchers this made it one of the largest premodern cities in the world, built up over several centuries of growth at different rates.
The findings leverage more than 30 years of data to create the first model of demographic growth in this capital of the Khmer Empire.
Sarah Klassen and colleagues suggested that this technique for modelling urban centre growth may be applied to other premodern cities.
Researchers said that this could offer answers to some of archaeology’s greatest challenges, including the rise and decline of social complexity.
The question of Angkor’s demographic growth has been a source of persistent speculation and controversy since the start of modern scholarship in the region.
Tourists have recorded themselves running through the ancient Cambodian temple (pictured)
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 ‘kept up an army of five or six million soldiers’.
The first reasonably systematic attempt to calculate the population of Angkor was undertaken by archaeologist Bernard-Philippe Groslier.
He cautiously suggested a total population of 1.9 million in a region around Angkor in the last 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 had ever been completed, since the city’s nonreligious architectural structures were made from organic materials that decayed long ago.
This rendered conventional population size and density estimation methods impossible, according to Klassen and colleagues.
To overcome this challenge they combined decades of archaeological excavation data, historical archives and maps, recent lidar assessments, and several machine learning algorithms to create maps that model the city’s growth through time.
The ancient temple in Siem Reap, Cambodia, is is one of the most significant archaeological sites in southeast Asia
The researchers found that it may have taken several centuries for Angkor’s population to reach its peak, with growth occurring at different rates in 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.
By comparing Angkor’s growth with other preindustrial tropical and subtropical urban centres, the researchers determined that its range of metropolitan urban area densities was much lower than those of the Mayan city of Caracol.
Yet its civic-ceremonial centre densities were comparable to those of Teotihuacan in what is now Mexico or Anyang in China.
The findings have been published in the journal Science Advances.