Producing high-quality, map-based displays for economic, medical, educational, or any other kind of statistical data with geographic covariates has always been challenging. Either it was necessary to have access to high-end software or one had to do a lot of detailed programming. Recently, R software for linked micromap (LM) plots has been enhanced to handle any available shapefiles from Geographic Information Systems (GIS). Also, enhancements have been made that allow for a fast overlay of various statistical graphs on Google maps. In this article, we provide an overview of the necessary steps to produce such graphs in R, starting with GIS-based data and shapefiles and ending with the resulting graphs in R. We will use data from a study on Chinese religions and society (provided by the China Data Center at the University of Michigan) as a case study for these graphical methods.