He grew up in front of a million strangers. Then, one day, the cameras could no longer find him. This is the documented life — and unsolved disappearance — of Monkey Rojo.
By [Nako] | Siem Reap, Cambodia
Dawn at Angkor does not belong to the temples anymore. It belongs to the monkeys. Before the first tour bus rolls out of Siem Reap, the long-tailed macaques are already descending the causeway balustrades in single file, tails hoisted like question marks, picking their way across stone that has stood for nine centuries. They are wild animals in theory. In practice, for more than a decade, some of them were something else entirely: celebrities.
Among them was a small male the world came to know as Rojo. He never wore a collar, a tag, or a tracker’s harness. No scientist ever logged his weight. And yet for a few years, millions of people on five continents watched him learn to walk.
Chapter One: The Temple of Monkeys
The macaques of the Angkor temple complex — crab-eating macaques, Macaca fascicularis — are native to the forest that folds around the ruins of Angkor Wat and Angkor Thom. For most of history they were background noise: shadows in the canopy, thieves of offerings, minor deities’ unruly doubles. That changed in the mid-2010s, when a Cambodian cameraman known online as Sochun, founder of the channel SP BBlover, began filming them daily. He did not film them as wildlife. He filmed them as characters.
Sochun named the matriarchs, ranked the alpha males, tracked the babies. His founding subject, viewers say, was a scruffy, fur-thinning female named Amber — which is why his audience still calls the troop the Amber Group, though the fan-made archive of these animals eventually catalogued it under a different title: Queen’s Troop. Following Sochun’s success, a cottage industry of channels sprang up: Angkor Daily, Cambo Animal, Tube BBC, and dozens more, until the paths around the great temples were crowded with young men holding phones on selfie sticks, narrating monkey drama in real time.
It was into this strange arena — half forest, half film set — that Rojo was born, around 2016, to a female named Scarlet.
Chapter Two: A Star in the Dappled Shade
SP BBlover gave the infant his own serial: Scarlet Rojo Life. At least twenty-two episodes survive — an astonishing archive for a wild animal — and they read like a diary of a first year of life.
In the early episodes, Rojo is all elbow and appetite: learning to stagger away from his mother, tumbling back to her when the world got too large. By episode five she is letting him practice walking. In episode six, Scarlet carries him out to meet the tourists at Angkor Thom. In the adored “Red Ghost” episode, the little monkey snatches a visitor’s scarf and parades it like a costume while the camera laughs. Later episodes show him wrestling playmates, straying further and further from his mother — “Baby Monkey Want to Stay Freedom”, reads the title of one — and, by episode twenty-two, walking alone with new confidence.
“Rojo is strong baby monkey, he always walk alone.”— SP BBlover, Scarlet Rojo Life, Episode 22
The internet could not get enough. Clips of the tiny macaque ricocheted across YouTube and Facebook. Repost channels built entire identities on him — Baby Monkey RoJo’s Family gathered some 30,000 subscribers; another simply called itself Monkey Rojo. A single recycled short, “Poor Baby monkey NewBorn Rojo,” drew two and a half million views. For context: the animal had no agent, no zoo, no exhibit. He had a mother, a troop, and a cameraman.
Chapter Three: The Storytellers’ Archive
By 2018, the fandom had become so intricate that volunteers built a reference site — the Angkor Wat & Thom Monkey Archives — to keep the genealogies straight. It lists Queen’s Troop down to the infants: alpha female Queen and her daughter Princess; Daisy, April and May in their unusual three-generation line; and, in the roster’s quiet middle, a single line that now reads like an epitaph:
“Scarlet — Youngest: Rojo [M].”— Angkor Wat & Thom Monkey Archives, Queen’s Troop roster
That one bracketed letter — [M], male — would turn out to be the most important word in Rojo’s story.
Chapter Four: The Shadows Behind the Camera
Any honest documentary of Rojo has to step into the shade, because the scene that made him famous was never innocent. Animal-welfare investigators and Cambodian authorities had been warning for years that the monkey-video industry rewarded the wrong behavior. Operators lured monkeys with food; some staged rescues and suffering for views. In April 2024, the Associated Press documented YouTubers at Angkor dousing a baby monkey with water while it screamed, and worse. APSARA, the authority that guards the temples, announced investigations and threatened legal action; YouTube and Facebook purged videos and channels by the score.
Meanwhile the feeding had rewired the troop’s behavior. Macaques that waited for cameras became bold, then demanding, then — the word officials now use — aggressive. By February 2025, APSARA was publicly warning tourists that the monkeys of Angkor were biting visitors, ripping food from hands, and damaging the temples themselves.
The authorities’ answer to an unruly monkey was not a warning. It was a cage, a dart, or a truck.
Chapter Five: The Vanishing
Somewhere between the confident little monkey of Scarlet Rojo Life 22 and the present day, Rojo disappears from the record. There is no final episode. There is no announcement. There is only the ongoing stream of Angkor monkey footage — and Rojo’s absence from it. So what happened to him? The documented evidence offers four currents, and likely all of them carried him away.
First: biology. Remember that bracketed [M]. Among long-tailed macaques, daughters inherit the troop; sons must leave it. As males mature — typically around four to six years old — they emigrate from their natal group, drifting to the periphery, joining bands of bachelors, and eventually insinuating themselves into another troop entirely. Rojo, born around 2016, would have reached that age between 2020 and 2022. A wild macaque wears no collar and answers to no name away from the camera. The day young Rojo walked off his natal range, he became — to the only audience he had ever had — invisible. Fans of the Angkor channels know this vanishing well; it is the oldest ending in their archive.
Second: the storytellers stopped telling. The Scarlet Rojo Life series simply ends around its twenty-second episode, nine years ago. The pioneering channels waned, shifted platforms, or burned out. And in 2024–25 the whole ecosystem convulsed: under investigation by Cambodian authorities and pressure from animal-welfare groups, platforms deleted monkey channels wholesale. The lens through which the world saw Rojo was shattered.
Third: the roundups. Rojo came of age in the years when Angkor’s patience ran out. In 2019, more than twenty macaques were trapped at the park and trucked to forests in Pursat province. In late 2020, rangers darted sixteen monkeys around the Bayon and hauled them to Phnom Tamao Zoological Park. In October 2022, the beloved troop queen Amari and her daughter Lori — two of the most famous monkey faces on Earth — were captured and taken to the Phnom Tamao rescue center, never to return to the temples. Then, in late 2024, Cambodia’s Ministry of Agriculture announced a formal census of Angkor’s macaques, with plans to relocate the “aggressive” ones to Phnom Tamao, distant wildlife sanctuaries — or, animal groups warned, to the breeding farms that export Cambodian macaques to laboratories worldwide. A large, roaming, habituated adult male is precisely the monkey such an operation looks for. No official list of the taken exists. Names are not recorded.
Fourth: the unrecorded ending. Life at Angkor is short and sharp. Fans have logged monkeys killed by cars (little Buttercup, run over while sleeping beneath a wheel), by falls from trees (Janna), by invading males (Daniella). If Rojo died in the forest between film shoots, the forest would have kept it to itself.
“The monkey should be living in the wild, where they are supposed to be living. But the monkey nowadays is being treated like a domestic pet.”— Long Kosal, APSARA spokesman, April 2024
Where Is Monkey Rojo?
Stack the probabilities as a biologist would. Rojo did not die on camera, and no roundup manifest bears his name, because no such manifest exists. The simplest story is also the most natural one: the little male who “always walk alone” grew up, walked further alone, and left the frame forever — one more anonymous, full-grown macaque in a troop that still files across the causeway each dawn over the Tonle Om. If he lives, he is about ten years old now, in his prime, possibly the sire of infants the current channels are filming under brand-new names.
Perhaps that is the right ending for a wild thing: to escape his own celebrity. The tragedy of Rojo’s generation was never the disappearing. It was the appearing — the years in which wild monkeys were fed, staged, and monetized until they could no longer tell a hand from a trap. His story survives in twenty-two grainy episodes and one line in a fan wiki, and it asks a fair question of everyone who watches: the next time a baby monkey at a temple steps toward your camera, will you be recording his childhood — or his captivity?
Choose carefully. Somewhere in the forest beyond the Bayon, there may be an old monkey who once stole a tourist’s scarf, and got away.
✦ ✦ ✦
The Documented Timeline
c. 2016
Rojo is born to Scarlet, a female of Queen’s Troop (“Amber Group”), in the Angkor Wat–Angkor Thom temple forest, Siem Reap, Cambodia.
2016–17
SP BBlover (Sochun) films the Scarlet Rojo Life series — 22+ episodes following his first year. Clips go viral worldwide.
2018
The fan-run Angkor Wat & Thom Monkey Archives lists “Scarlet — Youngest: Rojo [M]” in its Queen’s Troop roster.
2019
Cambodian authorities relocate 20+ “vicious” macaques from the Angkor park to forest in Pursat province.
2020
Sixteen macaques darted and removed from around the Bayon temple; taken to Phnom Tamao Zoo for quarantine before planned release.
2020–22
Rojo, a maturing male, reaches the age at which long-tailed macaques naturally emigrate from their birth troop. He fades from filmed view.
Oct 2022
Famous troop queen Amari and daughter Lori are captured and taken to Phnom Tamao Wildlife Rescue Center with Wildlife Alliance’s help — proving even celebrity monkeys could vanish overnight.
Apr 2024
AP Investigation: Cambodian authorities begin investigating YouTubers’ abuse of Angkor monkeys; platforms purge videos and channels.
Sep 2024
Ministry of Agriculture announces a macaque census at Angkor and plans to relocate “aggressive” monkeys — alarm over possible transfer to breeding farms.
Feb 2025
APSARA publicly warns tourists of aggressive, YouTuber-habituated macaques attacking visitors at the temples.
Today
Rojo’s whereabouts are unrecorded. No official tracking of individual temple macaques exists.
Fact File — Monkey Rojo
| Species | Long-tailed (crab-eating) macaque, Macaca fascicularis |
| Sex | Male |
| Born | Circa 2016, Angkor Archaeological Park, Siem Reap, Cambodia |
| Mother | Scarlet |
| Troop | Queen’s Troop (a.k.a. “Amber Group”) |
| Home Range | Angkor Wat & Angkor Thom (Bayon) temple forest |
| Famed For | Scarlet Rojo Life YouTube series (22+ episodes, SP BBlover) |
| Status | Unknown — last documented as a maturing juvenile/adult |
| Conservation Note | Species listed Endangered (IUCN, 2022 assessment) amid trade pressure; Cambodia’s macaque exports under CITES scrutiny |
A Note on Sources & HonestyThis documentary is built entirely from the public record: the surviving SP BBlover footage, the volunteer-run Angkor Wat & Thom Monkey Archives, Cambodian newspaper reporting, and international coverage of the 2024–25 monkey investigations. Rojo was a wild, untagged animal; no authority tracks temple macaques by name. Where this piece describes why he disappeared, it presents documented events (removals, channel purges) alongside the established biology of male macaque dispersal — and says plainly where the record falls silent. Anything beyond that would be invention, and Rojo deserves better.
Sources & Further Viewing
- Angkor Wat & Thom Monkey Archives — Queen’s Troop roster (Scarlet & Rojo)
- SP BBlover — Scarlet Rojo Life 6 · Life 18 (“Red Ghost”) · Life 22
- Wildlife Alliance — Amari and Lori taken to Phnom Tamao Wildlife Rescue Center (Oct 2022)
- Phnom Penh Post — Aggressive macaques removed from Angkor (2019) · Nuisance monkeys relocated to zoo (2020)
- Associated Press / VOA — Cambodia investigates YouTubers’ abuse of monkeys (Apr 2024)
- The Independent — Monkey census at Angkor sparks fears (Sep 2024)
- South China Morning Post — Monkeys attack tourists at Angkor Wat, egged on by YouTubers (Feb 2025)
Header image is an artistic illustration. Video stills belong to the original uploaders. Written for personal blog publication — replace “[Nako]” before posting.
