[Photos] An Artist's Sketches Capture the Charm of Indochina's Street Vendors

These illustrations of vendors working on Hanoi streets during French colonial rule are half-sketched, half-painted, which adds to the air of memories fading. 

We often share images of the past. Is it more profound to view old scenes of Hanoi via the lens of photographic realism, or does the subjectivity of an artist's sketch add a further element of intrigue? 

The following sketches, collated by Flickr user manhhai, were created by a French artist and contain not only artwork but also French prose alongside the musical notes of songs with Vietnamese lyrics.

The precise date they were created is difficult to pin down, yet they appear to be from an old French journal called Extreme-Asie: Revue Indochinese, which was published in the 1920s. 

In the drawings, we see merchants flogging goods, market stalls full of fresh produce, Hanoi's Old Quarter streets in pastel hues and the capital's famous red bridge arching across Hoan Kiem Lake.