Gāo Gǒng 高拱 (1512–1578), zì Sùqīng 肅卿, hào Zhōngxuán 中玄, posthumously Wénxiāng 文襄, was the principal political figure of the Lóngqìng (1567–1572) era and a leading cízhāng of the late Jiājìng court. Native of Xīnzhèng 新鄎 (Hénán). Jìnshì of Jiājìng xīnchǒu (1541). Rose to Lìbù shàngshū (Minister of Personnel) and ultimately to Zhōngjídiàn dàxuéshì (Senior Grand Secretary, the de facto first minister) under the Lóngqìng emperor; dismissed in 1572 by the Wànlì regents Zhāng Jūzhèng 張居正 and Féng Bǎo 馮保 in the famous transition-power-struggle. Returned to Hénán in retirement; died there in 1578. Biography in Míng shǐ j. 213.
(Note: CBDB id 30847 records his birth year as 1510; the standard Míng biographical record gives 1512, followed here. CBDB has alternative homonym entries for “high gong” — id 289236, 310512 — without dates; these are unrelated persons.)
Gāo Gǒng was a substantial scholar in addition to his political career: tutor of the heir apparent (the future Lóngqìng emperor), he produced significant cízhāng and a number of substantive scholarly works. His KR1e0080 Chūnqiū zhèngzhǐ 春秋正旨 is the most widely-cited of his classical-scholarship monographs; his Wènbiàn lù 問辨錄 (Sìkù entry KR3a0119) on the Sìshū is the second most important. The Chūnqiū zhèngzhǐ takes a sharply anti-Hú Ānguó line, rejecting the orthodox examination commentary’s bāobiǎn readings on the basis of philological-rational analysis. Modern collected works: Gāo Wénxiānggōng wén jí 高文襄公文集 (preserved in WYG and other collectanea).
His political fall in 1572 has been the subject of substantial recent reconsideration in the Chinese-language historiography (see esp. Yuè Tiānyǔ 岳天宇, Gāo Gǒng yánjiū 高拱研究, Bēijīng dàxué 2010), which has tended to rehabilitate Gāo against the Zhāng Jū-zhèng-aligned standard Míng shǐ account.