You want to create a geographical map from an Esri shapefile.

Load the shapefile using readShapePoly() from the maptools package, convert it to a data frame with fortify(), then plot it (Figure 13-39):

library(maptools)

# Load the shapefile and convert to a data frame
taiwan_shp <- readShapePoly("TWN_adm/TWN_adm2.shp")
taiwan_map <- fortify(taiwan_shp)

ggplot(taiwan_map, aes(x = long, y = lat, group=group)) + geom_path()

Figure 13-39. A map created from a shapefile

Esri shapefiles are a common format for map data. The readShapePoly() function reads a shape file and returns a SpatialPolygonsDataFrame object:

taiwan_shp <- readShapePoly("TWN_adm/TWN_adm2.shp")

# Look at the structure of the object
str(taiwan_shp)

Formal class 'SpatialPolygonsDataFrame' [package "sp"] with 5 slots
  ..@ data       :'data.frame': 22 obs. of  11 variables:
  .. ..$ ID_0     : int [1:22] 223 223 223 223 223 223 223 223 223 223 ...
  .. ..$ ISO      : Factor w/ 1 level "TWN": 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 ...
  .. ..$ NAME_0   : Factor w/ 1 level "Taiwan": 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 ...
  .. ..$ ID_1     : int [1:22] 1 2 3 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 ...
 ... [lots more stuff]
  ..@ proj4string:Formal class 'CRS' [package "sp"] with 1 slots
  .. .. ..@ projargs: chr NA